A tale of three readers
I’m a long-time Google Reader user and here is my take on a few of the news readers available on the App Store, all from the perspective of an iPod Touch 2G owner!
Byline was the very first paid GR-integrated app that I put on my phone and compared to the GR web interface, it was awesome. The folder syncing, the ability to read folders as a whole and not feed-by-feed… what wasn’t to like?
Unfortunately, along the way, there were some design changes that started to make the app more irritating to use. Take, for example, the reverse blue disclosure icons. Pressing this drops down all of the feeds in that folder, something I found quite counter-intuitive.
But, this isn’t Byline’s biggest flaw. SInce upgrading to iOS4, Byline crashes. A lot. For example, I was trying to expand a folder to take a screenshot and it crashed. I opened an article to do the same and it crashed. The overall instability is so bad that I had to stop using it out of sheer frustration.
Next in line was the current darling of the Apple blogs, Reeder. The app is very nice to look at, especially with it’s status bar update, muted grey interface and torn paper date breaks.
All well and good, but again, post iOS4, the stability issues that plagued Byline are also present in Reeder. While nowhere near as pronounced, the app still crashes when browsing articles, sometimes while syncing; it’s not something you can predict. While I keep Reeder installed in the hope of a fix, I’m not so worried, mainly because of…
With three versions of the app in the store, each with differing levels of functionality, I actually snagged the Pro version as part of a sale a few months ago. I installed the app, but gave it very little attention, as the navigation, appearance and functionality seemed a bit out of kilter when compared to my other readers and it was soon deleted.
However, thanks to the instability of Reeder and Byline under iOS4 and my growing frustration to find a news reader that just worked, I reinstalled MobileRSS to see if it could at least stay running on my iPod. Turns out that in the meantime, the MobileRSS interface had undergone some very nice updates and has now got me hooked!
The app has a grey-blue appearance, slightly reminiscent of the one in Reeder, but it has a lot of great features that I find very appealing. For example, a simple one - marking all articles as read. It’s as easy as hitting the tick icon and choosing ‘Mark All As Read’.
MobileRSS also has great caching of articles that uses the pull-up-to-load feature that has been discussed across many blogs recently. I find it works very well, loading 15 articles at a time, smoothly bringing them into view.
The article view is also one of my favourite features, as the chrome of the interface all drops away, leaving a mobile-friendly version of the article. Tapping the screen brings up the controls, which allow you to perform a few operations, including posting to various services, such as Twitter or Delicious.
Swiping left or right will move between posts and pulling down at the top sends you back to the list of articles.
Stability-wise, MobileRSS very rarely crashes, no matter how many articles I add to a folder’s cache or articles I read. I can’t recommend MobileRSS enough. For an app that started out on my iPod as a cheap alternative, it’s now become my go-to news reader and I don’t see that changing any time soon, irrespective of stability fixes in the other apps, just because of the great interface features.
Give the free version a go, and I wholly expect that you’ll upgrade!
