I was seriously starting to think I am only one who wants this from web-based rss-reader. Most of the native rss clients are built around this behaviour and I really cannot understand why web readers don't. Maybe A/B testing with bad test cases (or without enough diverse user population) or maybe we are just crazy.
> It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps
Android at least has. It was/is really nicely hidden under all unofficial, privacy violating rip-offs in the Google store.
So.. if they were smart they'd do something that's impossible, you're saying.
I switched to Newsblur, and apart from some small issues with the UI (which is getting better), I've been really happy. The iOS app is also nice. The downside is of course that it costs money, but it really isn't that much IMHO.
I've not felt the need to try any others since switching
It should probably default to being locked...
One of my favorite things about Newsblur is how minutely configurable it is, but I think all of that is probably throwing off new users.
Today I see it's just (a) email address and (b) know who you are on Google. Glad to see they changed it.
They aren't charging anything, maybe they should make an app...
I've been juggling between that and YoleoReader to get better acquainted with them and will settle for one after getting properly used to one of them.
I believe i came across it the other day and brushed off because I didn't see a Register link (not signing up with Google or Facebook anywhere). But I logged in today and was fairly surprised to see the number of features available to the readers.
The key to any good Reader is the availability of the customizing features for the end-users, plus of course the speed and scalability. As soon as I plugged in HN feed to inoreader, I saw thousands of feeds fetched ready for me to scroll quickly. That's a first good sign.
(1) confusing vertical scrolls with horizontal swipes;
(2) going back to the top of a story after rotating the screen;
(3) limited ability to manage feeds;
(4) an annoying delay when switching between screens;
(5) failure to follow the Jelly Bean "up" convention
(6) pictures would not be automatically scaled to fit the screen
it wasn't _terrible_ either. I'm sad to see Reader go, but there was plenty of room for improvement. I'm now happily using (and paying for) Newsblur.
That iPhone-focused mobile view served me well for many years. I vastly preferred it to all iterations of the Android app and often use it on my desktop too. Showing only 15 items and being able to mark just them as read was a great workflow for me.
Do any of the alternatives to Reader have a good app for Android ?
Personally, I want a centralized solution, not a standalone daemon running on a private server. I switched to reader from a Gnome feed reader after losing all of my subscriptions due to losing access to a home directory. From there (in 2004 I think) I've built a massive collection of diverse sources covering every position, philosophy, point of view, etc. I can. I have so many feeds that I cannot possible read all of them, and so many that the Feedly mobile UI on Android won't even display the entire list.
Feedly appears to have imported everything I want from Reader, including the tags that I have created over the years, and the folder structure. None of this appears to be in a simple OPML export. (But thanks Dave for standardizing that.)
I think everything is preserved in Feedly, and now that the pressure of Normandy is off I hope that they will work to address those people that brought them all of these new accounts, and all of the press surrounding this mass migration. The Reader theme is a start but doesn't go far enough.
As Feedler 2.0 only showed up in the app store yesterday I assume the Pro version is stuck somewhere in the approvals process ...
I'm willing to overlook the bugs such as the same item appearing more than once in a feed (it's quite new), but the incredible slowness of it make it unusable for me.
For example, I loaded it before writing this comment, and as of this point, it still hasn't finished loading. I just get a spinny box and 'Loading...'
I also know from experience that if you click on something else, such as a folder, it won't override what it's currently loading, so the state of the UI will get out of sync.
You also can't read a list of items, you have to read one by one, incurring yet another AJAXy-load which doesn't necessarily ever respond, thus leaving in you in Loading... limbo.
Did you contact the developer? She seems quite eager to help.
I do wish the doubles would disappear, though.
The current layout make it too hard for me to move quickly through a large number of items.
I appreciate the effort but even if it did manage to import my feeds the UI just doesn't work for me.
A limitation is that a feed can't appear twice in the treeview (or it will be duplicated), but apart from that, it's mostly a clone of GReader.
Feedbin's web client acts pretty strangely sometimes, but it's the one that best fits my Reader workflow.
It's been heavily modified since the news of GReader going away was announced and it's easy to write plugins for it. I've got my version of it tweaked to the gills and it's even better than GReader was in my opinion.
Besides its somewhat quirky UI, the main problem I have with feedly is that it seems predicated on the assumption that you will more or less read through all articles, one by one, in order, and finish them.
That's not how I use reader at all. I leave thousands of things left unread, and yet google reader makes it quite easy to keep up to date with whatever I feel like reading at the moment, without getting bogged down by all the stuff I don't want to read. It lets me categorize stuff hierarchically, and then drill down to what I want to look at, and maintains unread counts for each level, easily visible all at once. It's easy to see what categories/subcategories have new stuff. It's easy to mark stuff as read/unread, one by one, or in bulk by category. Yadayada.
Feedly basically flattens and linearizes everything, and doesn't give any summary information, so I constantly feel unsure what's available without looking, and once I look, I quickly get lost in the undifferentiated flow of articles.
Of course Google reader also allows a more "feedly-style" one-big-stream mode of operation via its summary feeds. Except that it does a better job of it by allowing multiple different views, and provides summary information for all of them too.
And despite all that flexibility and power, Google reader's interface seems far simpler than feedly's... it's really just a tree-list-view thingy like we're all used to from a zillion apps, and everything just sort of works like you expect it.
It does all that, and because it's web-based, everything's always in sync no matter where you read. It doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, but it works pretty well on smartphone browsers (and even on dumbphone browsers, although it started to flake out during authentication a few months ago, presumably because Google wasn't keeping it updated).
So basically reader's about a zillion times better, with one glaring exception: it's going away... TT
[The closest free replacement I've found so far is "yoleoreader", which kinda gets the vibe right, although it's a bit rough in places...]