Posts Tagged ‘rss’
Reeder
June 7th, 2010 at 6:18 am
Fed up with NetNewsWire, I got Reeder over a month ago, and it’s made RSS feed reading on the iPhone a pleasure. It’s advantages over NNW are:
- Syncing always works. Like every RSS reader nowadays, Reeder syncs online with Google Reader. Items that I’ve read on my iPhone are never in the unread list when I go back to my computer, and vice versa. When I used NNW, syncing mistakes were a once a week occurrence.
- Speed. Reeder starts up *much* faster than NNW and is just as fast going from article to article. It’s possible that part of the speed difference is due to NNW’s ads (I have the free version), but I’m not interested in buying the no-ad version of NNW to check this.
- The controls work. The Next Item button in NNW is always enabled, even when there is no next item. The equivalent down arrow button in Reeder is disabled (grayed out) when you’re reading the last item.
- It makes the feed from Roger Ebert’s blog readable. I’ve mentioned before that Roger puts everything after the lead paragraph or two inside triple
<blockquote>tags, which causes the text to run down the center of the screen in a barely-readable trickle only a dozen or so characters wide. Like this:
That’s NNW, but other RSS readers do the same thing. Reeder must have some special “Ebert mode,” because it displays the text like this:
which is the best I can hope for until someone tells Roger how to get indentation through CSS instead of 1990s-style tagging.
Reeder has the usual WebKit-based builtin browser for when you want to follow a link but don’t want to switch to Mobile Safari. It also has ties to Delicious, Instapaper, Twitter, and other services I don’t use and can’t remember. I don’t count these as Reeder advantages, because other feed reader apps do the same, but it’s good to know that Reeder isn’t behind in integration features.
Not everything about Reeder is perfect. The little buttons in the bottom toolbar are too little:
and I wish it would show me the count of remaining unread items in the top bar while I’m reading.
I was worried at first that the gray background would be too low in contrast for my middle-aged eyes, but that hasn’t been the case.
In short, the good things I heard about Reeder before I bought it were true. It’s turned out to be one of my best app purchases.
Dumping MobileRSS
March 11th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
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. ↩
Headline Fallows
February 27th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
The Atlantic rolled out some big changes to its website a couple of days ago. Normally, I wouldn’t notice something like this, because even though I’m a regular reader of James Fallows’ blog, I almost never visit the site itself. As I do with all my favorite blogs, I subscribe to his RSS feed and read his posts in Google Reader. But since the redesign, I can’t do that anymore.
Oh, there’s still a feed, but it provides only the headlines of Fallows’ posts, nothing more. Not even the first paragraph or two to give a you a decent sense of the post’s topic. I assume the idea behind this change is to force us to go to the main site, pumping up the pageviews for The Atlantic’s advertisers. It won’t work; you can’t force someone to follow a link, and readers who’ve jumped on the RSS train will not be jumping off.
Merlin Mann has written a couple of tart posts today about the stupidity of this change. I’m more disappointed than angry, but the source of our displeasure is the same: we like reading Fallows, and we will read much less of him because of the anemic new feed. I sent this email to Fallows:
Is there some way you can prevail upon the Atlantic’s webmasters (and their masters) to return the RSS feed to providing the full text of your posts? I understand the need to make money and would not complain if the feed included ads. Many of the feeds I subscribe to have ads (Talking Points Memo, for example), and I stay subscribed to them. But I won’t continue to subscribe to a feed that provides only headlines.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. People who do a lot of reading online have gotten used to using RSS and will not go back to the old way of clicking back and forth between dozens of sites. Especially since much of our blog reading is now done on our smartphones.
I mentioned Talking Points Memo because I know it’s a site Fallows is familiar with. I could just as easily have mentioned Daring Fireball or TidBITS. They’ve all figured out ways to get ads in their feeds, meeting the advertising requirements necessary to keep their businesses going while still providing articles in a form their readers want.
Update 2/28/10
Fallows sent me (and, apparently, about 800 other people) a polite response, agreeing with our complaints. Later came this post, acknowledging the RSS feed problem, and this one, telling us that it’s been fixed. I’m not sure that it has been fixed just yet—the “fixed” post still hasn’t appeared in my RSS reader—but it’s clear that a fix is at least on the way.
Interestingly, the headline-only feeds were not a bad commercial decision; they were just bad programming. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.