If there’s one app that I need to download as soon as I restore my iDevice, it would be Reeder for iPhone. I’m a guy who’s obsessed with news and I can’t live without reading my favorite RSS feeds ever day. I’ve been owning an iPhone since 2008, and I used to read all the news with NetNewsWire, one of the oldest RSS feed reader for the Mac, which then got ported to iPhone via the App Store.
It was in 2009 that my RSS feed reading experience on my iPhone changed all together. Reeder for iPhone was launched and not many took notice of it initially. The app which was created by Silvio Rizzi had all that I wanted in a RSS feed reader on the iPhone and also, with the gestures, it was like a piece of cake for me to flip through my articles. With an intuitive Sepia UI, and a very powerful sharing option which came along with the app enhanced my reading experience.
There is one more reason for me to choose Reeder. It was the fast than many other RSS feed readers that existed in the market. I was using Reeder on my older iPhone and it was damn fast when compared to NetNewsWire or ByLine. And I was not alone, but many other iPhone users who loved Reeder. This gave a huge lift for the developer and he was then able to port this brilliant app onto Mac and iPad. Silvio Rizzi now has the entire Apple ecosystem in him making Reeder available for every other version of iOS, with all the features that the users loved.
But then, months passed on, and many other new features and APIs opened up for the developers. My worries about Reeder’s stability and updates gradually increased. But just about a month after my worry, Reeder received a major update for its iPhone app, and the version name bumped up to 3.0.
Here’s a quick look at what’s new in Reeder 3.0 for iPhone: its misses and losses!
Feature Review:
Reeder 3.0 for iPhone – Still holds true for what we loved it for.
The Reeder 3.0 supported only Google Reader from its first version, and obviously, 3.0 holds to the roots of where the app came from. The app has been re-written completely, and now has three more options for fetching your RSS feeds despite Google Reader.
Reeder 3.0 now asks you to choose which service you’d want to add to Reeder. Here are the services that Reeder supports apart from Google Reader:
- Readability
- Fever
- Google Reader
The best part is, if you have personal and official Google Reader feeds, Reeder lets you add more than one Google Reader accounts to the app. And the new update respects all the aspects of how a perfect RSS reader would work.
Service Handling:
It’s been a few months since Google Reader got its much needed overhaul, and now, Reeder has taken advantage of the typography that iOS Supports and took reading Google Reader articles a step further, setting new standards for the mobile RSS feed reading experience.
Reeder 3.0 can now be considered as a very tightly integrated and beautiful app for the Google Reader, and the app has all the features that the Google Reader for Web has. The Reader 3.0 is now faster than before, and the app handles thousands of articles with ease. The app launch time has also improved so much, that makes us feel like the DB is completely empty that it boots fast.
The entire look and feel has been simplified. The app now gives more importance to the content and heading than any other element of the app, which is really good. When compared to Reeder 2.3, the 3.0 has got a lighter tint of sepia effect, and also, has an increased font-size with sharper font renderings.
Reeder has increased the Google Reader’s reading flow, where I can view all the unread items, with one single tap, also, the app’s “Mark as Read” option is a boon for the user. Once you have the Google Reader account added, you’ll end up with the settings screen, which will let you quickly configure the app for your need. Until Reeder 3.0, the users had no option to add a feed right from the app. If you’d want to add a feed to your Google Reader, you will have to go back to your Google Reader web interface, and then add the feed. But not anymore with Reeder. You’ll find a ‘+’ button at the top right corner, which will let you add subscriptions right inside the app.
Now, when you are inside the article, you’d see that the heading is centered and this is followed by the Author name and the blog’s name and the article content. Tapping the AA button on the top right will give you some more options to change the typography of the article as you wish. Now, here’s something interesting. The majestic Readability sofa is placed at the center top of the article view. Tapping it will pass on the article to readability.
But with this change, I was afraid if Reeder would loose the feature that would navigate between articles without going back to the feed. That is, by swiping up or down to move between next and previous article. But I was amazed to see the new animation (Folded Paper) animation that would take us between the articles. I love this animation. Also, when you are in the view, which shows the list of articles from a blog, you can mark a feed item as red by just pinching apart. All these features are in the image below.
Having spoken about Google Reader for sometime, its worthy to note that almost all the needed features are available for the other services that came with the app like Readability and also, Fever – A self hosted RSS feed engine, built with PHP.
Sharing:
The app maintains the same sharing functionality from the previous version, but this time with new icons and neat and tidy sharing pop-up.
The sharing option has got more intuitive now. Twitter sharing has now been integrated into iOS5’s Tweet Sheet. The tweet sheet automatically adds the title of the article to the tweet and adds the link automatically to the sheet! I loved this feature personally.
Image Handling:
Reeder 3.0 handles images on a single article view pretty well. You can pinch to zoom on an image, or you can actually hold an image to get a pop-up window, which will let you perform some operations on the image, like view the alt-text of the image, or save the image to the library or, you can share it over to Mail, Twitter or Evernote.
Load Time and Navigation:
With loads of new features fed into the application, I was surprised to see the app perform a lot faster than it was before. The navigation is pretty much the same with the previous version and there’s been some minor changes in handling bundled items in a folder.
One more navigation feature that I loved was the ability to navigate back from the article view with just a swipe from left to right.
So, here’s comes Reeder 3.0:
Overall, the app is a perfect client for Google Reader, Readability and Fever. This update will take me closer to the app rather than to lower my expectations. The new update is completely modernized, and it defines a new benchmark for the RSS feed reader clients that are to come in the future. Right from managing my subscriptions to sharing an article, Reeder has satisfied everything I need. And for some of my friends who use Fever, Reeder has become their favorite app almost instantly.
It’s been three years since Reeder got into the app store and also on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. And this would still stay at the top of my app list for the best RSS feed reader.
With this review, I would like to personally thank Rizzi for making an app that I’ve never regretted paying for. We would like to see the update extended to the iPad and Mac soon!
You can purchase Reeder 3.0 for iPhone from the App Store for $2.99.