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.
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The iOS clients are quite mature at this point. And as of this week, Sunstroke also has a very nice iPad UI. Previously he had released a Universal build that was just the “blown up” iPhone UI (which I was very happy to have as I like reading my feeds on the iPad) but the newly updated UI is pretty spiffy.
I expect we'll see updates to Reeder for iPad and the desktop soon and Mr Reader just had a big update this week too. Add in the activity around Feedbin, Feed Wrangler and the like and the future looks bright for feed readers.
@William My initial thoughts on ReadKit: works pretty well, but not AppleScriptable, smart folders are not as powerful as NetNewsWire 3’s, can’t open in the browser in the background, and can’t sort items by feed.
Webin founder Balazs Varkonyi explained to me that ReadKit does, in fact, have a preference to open links in the background. Select links can also be opened in the background by Command-clicking.
Give ReadKit a try on OS X. It seems to be a fine native client that edges out the fever web interface.