cinnamon thoughts.

Recently I came across Reeder which is a great news reader for the iPhone. It uses as a backend so it is easy to sync your feeds across multiple devices and clients (e.g. NetNewsWire on the Mac).

Reeder 1.2—which might get submitted to the app store as early as today—will be quite an update. I’ll show the main features currently included and what’s coming in this post.

Design

At first I didn’t like the design at all but after a few minutes I’ve realized it was just unfamiliar. Reeder’s elegant and clean layout has since grown on me and I don’t want to miss it during my mobile news reading.

The beautiful GUI is very clean and functional. Exactly what you’d want while reading your feeds. Next to the refresh icon you find three icons to switch between starred, unread and all items. Reeder also supports Google Reader’s Notes function which I’ve disabled. Version 1.2 doesn’t show a hint of this feature once it’s disabled which follows the tidy GUI approach.

Feeds, Folders and Items

Navigating into a folder will give you a view containing all items of the folder sorted by either source or date. Tapping on the circled arrow of a folder will show you a list of all feeds instead which is great should a folder have more than a few dozens of unread items (right).

While in the item list Reeder 1.2 will offer a clever feature you already know in a more destructive way: swiping an item in a list deletes notes, mails, etc. in the built-in apps provided by Apple. In Reeder you slide a cell to the left to star/unstar it and to the right to mark it a read/unread. As you already know the gesture it feels very natural.

Article View

The article view continues the tidy look. At the top you see the feed’s icon and beginning with version 1.2 you’ll find buttons to mark the item as read/unread and star/unstar it. You are also able to switch to the previous or next item and the familiar share icon gives you access to a number of sharing options.

Sharing

Reeder version 1.2 supports the following services to share/bookmark articles which can be separately enabled and disabled in the iPhone’s default Settings.app:

• Google Reader Share
• Google Reader Notes
• Twitter
• Instapaper
• Read It Later
• Delicious
• Pinboard
• Mail a link
• Mail the article

Twitter

As Twitter support seems to be the most requested feature (judging by the @replies directed at ) I’ll present you with a screenshot of this nice feature:

Personally I like the Titel and Link buttons which allow for more flexibility while composing your tweet.

Go Get It!

Considering the clean and tidy design of Reeder, it’s integration with many third party services and the devotion of its developer to fixing and improving even little things other developers just don’t notice, this is a must-have app for every RSS-reading iPhone or iPod touch owner.

You can for less then the price of a Starbucks coffee and enjoy it every day.

(Keep in mind that I was reviewing a beta version so please don’t leave bad reviews when some features are still missing. They are coming soon!)

Reeder website —

tags: @reederapp, , newsreader, preview, Reeder, Reeder 1.2, , Silvio Rizzi

Posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 20:35 by Daniel M. Gattermann. This Post is filed under Design, iPhone App, News, Software. You can follow responses through the and view other blogs commenting on this post. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.