Dumping MobileRSS
March 11, 2010 at 9:48 PM by Dr. Drang
Based on an article surveying iPhone newsreaders1, I downloaded the free version of MobileRSS and began using it last week. Tonight I’m deleting it.
It has some good points:
- Like many newsreaders now, it syncs with Google Reader, so you can do your feed reading on different devices and not have to think (much) about repetition.
- Its user interface is very Tweetie-like, which I consider high praise.
- It allows you to set a nice big default size, very important for us geezers with
bifocalsprogressive lenses.
But it’s terribly unstable, especially when you have more than a handful of unread items. Tonight it must have crashed—screen goes black, then back to the home screen—a dozen times as I made my way through about 20 items. That’s absurd. I suppose it’s possible that it’s bad code in the ads in the free version that’s causing the crashes, but with such bad performance I’m certainly not going to buy the ad-free version to find out.
Less important, but more comical, MobileRSS often got confused as to how many unread items I had in the queue. When I saw this, I had to take a screenshot.
Yes, it thinks I have -8 unread items. Apparently, I’ve read posts that are still rattling around in P.Z. Myers’ brain.
-
I’ve lost the link to the article and can’t identify it in my browser history. I don’t think much of its recommendations, anyway, so it’s no big loss. ↩
