Fever

At the suggestion of Kevin LaCoste, I decided to try out Fever. I don’t think I’ll have much use for its signature “takes the temperature of your slice of the web” feature, but as a personal RSS server it works well. The Web interface is very well done, though not as nice as a native app. I miss some features from NetNewsWire 3 such as nested folders, smart folders, and sorting by attention. I like how Fever has per-feed and per-group display preferences.

I was not impressed with how the Fever Web site works in Mobile Safari. The design is fine, but some important features are not available, and it feels very slow.

However, there are also several iPhone apps for accessing Fever, and I was blown away by how good they are. Both Reeder 3.1 and Sunstroke 1.5 work well and are fast enough for me. The situation is much better now than the last time I tried RSS (including Reeder) on iOS and gave up. Each app has a few elements that I prefer, but I will probably end up using Sunstroke because it seems to be faster than Reeder.

See also:

• Cody Fink shows how to install Fever on a cheap NearlyFreeSpeech account. (I just put it on my DreamHost VPS.)
• Jeff Benjamin reviews Sunstroke 1.4 and explains some features and options that were not obvious to me.
• Federico Viticci reviews an older version of Sunstroke.

Update (2015-04-06): Anthony Drendel:

I just made Sunstroke available for free on the App Store. As you may have noticed, Sunstroke hasn’t received any updates since last August’s huge full-text search update. This is due to two reasons:

1. I moved to a new city and country (Berlin, Germany) and started a new job (Objective-C developer at 6Wunderkinder, the makers of Wunderlist)

2. Sunstroke hasn’t made enough money to be worth my time.

Fever NetNewsWire ReadKit Reeder RSS Sunstroke Syncing

Anatomy of a Compiler Bug

Mike Ash:

It’s interesting that this bug only shows up when calling into gcc-compiled code. Using the buggy version of clang to call into other clang-compiled code doesn’t cause any trouble.

Clang GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Objective-C Programming

iCloud and User-Generated Data

Autriv:

Nonetheless we were denied for our use of iCloud. Apple’s reasoning was that they will not allow iOS applications to use iCloud to sync “non-user-generated” data between devices. After some lengthy followup, we learned that while using a “drawing application” to create a new piece of art and then saving that file would be considered “user-generated”, using our app to add a signature and content to a PDF and saving it as a new file is not “user-generated”. The exception, of course, being for Apple’s own iOS applications, like those in iWorks. So after a long phone call with Apple that equated to my logical arguments being repeatedly contested with the same sentence from an apparent script (“your app does not follow our guidelines regarding user-generated documents in iCloud”), what was their recommendation for how to get over this hurdle? Use a 3rd party iCloud competitor.

There are some other apps in the store that have been allowed to do this, so it’s unclear whether Apple’s reviewers are being inconsistent or there’s more to the SignMyPad story.

App Store App Store Rejection iCloud iOS iOS App SignMyPad