Adventure with iPad 2 (Part 5 – Searching for a RSS Reader)

Over the last few weeks, one of the continual problem with using the iPad as my main device is reading news feeds.  I normally subscribe to around 50 feeds with at least 20 being active daily. The weekday post count is some where around 500. While I don’t usually read all of them, I do scan through all the titles. When I was doing my reading on a computer, Google’s Reader was my choice for it’s simplicity and clean user interface. But things are a bit different on a touch interface.

Pulse is one of the 2 800 lb gorillas in the RSS reader space.  It is free so I’m not going to go through the obvious. There a couple of good things.  The UI is very slick. It takes full advantage of the touch screen. Flying back and forth between posts and feeds is very quick.  It has a connection to Google Reader so importing the subscriptions is very simple.  But there are also problems.  First, it is slow. The slick UI uses a picture from each post.  This necessitates additional download time. You might be interested in just 1 story but every story and its picture will have to be downloaded. Second, there is no other way to mark a post besides read and unread. Unread title text are bright white, read title text are gray.  Normally, you want at least 3 option: unread, not interested so mark it read, and read. With only read and unread, you are forced to open and close a story just so it will be grayed out. This might not seem like much but it turns into a chore really fast.  Third, closely related to the second is that there is no way to tell where you stop reading last unless you’ve marked the last post read (so it appears gray). In the past weeks, I’ve spent a good deal of time looking and scrolling, trying to find where I was the day before.

If you really think about it, these are the same problems with printed media.  As this type of readers are referred to as magazine style reader, they all unfortunately inherited the same problems from their printed counterparts. One interesting side note is that I never got the feel that Pulse downloaded every story in a given feed. Go figure.

The 2nd 800 lb gorilla in the realm is Flipboard. Again it is free so here’s just some highlights. The UI is even closer to a magazine so it is very intuitive to use with a design emphasis on letting the users customize their own “magazine” layout. But Flipboard have the exact same problems as Pulse, it is slow, there is no way to mark stories read without actually accessing each and every one, and there is no way to indicate where you were. In addition to these problems, adding a feed is a rather cumbersome exercise.  Instead of letting user cut and paste a RSS URL, it uses a feed search service called Blekko. Whether you can add a feed to your magazine will entirely depend on whether Blekko knows about it’s existence.  There are as least 2 feeds that I was not able to add because of this.

Google Reader, of course, is a potential choice. But the Google app for iOS merely launch you into Safari to use the web app in mobile mode.  It is possible to switch back to desktop mode but nothing in the web app takes advantage of the touch screen or the iPad’s native capabilities. Without a mouse, using Google Reader via web UI is a chore.

MobileRSS connects itself to Google Reader so they are in synch.  Unread feed counts are clearly marked and unread posts/stories are clearly marked.  It is easy to mark everything read once you read through a given feed for the time being.  The interface is clear and clean. The free version has a small ad bar under the feed list but it wasn’t too distracting.  With a 3 panes design (feeds, stories within a feed, and the content of a story), navigation is fairly intuituve.  In landscape mode, one pane is always covered but you can choose whether to see feed+story list or story list + content.  This layout works fairly well.  But in portrait mode, your own choices are feed + story list or content.  This makes navigating contents within a list more difficult.  Overall, this is a good reader.  I shall continue to use it for a couple of weeks and see how it works out.

Another reader that worked well so far is FeeddlerRSS.  FeeddlerRSS behaves closer to native Apple iOS apps like, for example, the Settings page for the iPad.  In the left pane you navigate through the feeds, in right pane you navigate the story list.  When you need to read the content, the story pops up from below covering both panes.  This app also connect and synch with Google Reader.  The free app has an ad bar on the bottom of the story list pane but it isn’t too big.  Read/Unread stories are clearly marked.  Marking multiple unread storeis is quick. The paid version has other features that allows better tagging, linking, sharing, and offline reading.  I might give it a shot later if they became important.

It became clear after trying a few of these top rated readers that your reading style is the single most important determinent of which reader will serve you. Magazine style readers are aimed at leisure readers who may once in a while pick up a magazine, read a bit here and there randomly.  If you just need something to occupy you while you stand in line or wait for the bus and the slickness is important, magazine style readers might be for you. If you read RSS daily as a matter of habit, read feeds to keep up with the latest and greatest, and not purely for leisure. You need to know exactly where you were last, what you haven’t read, and be able to navigate and mark posts quickly.  In that case, you need a reader that is a bit more precise, a bit more industrial, and less fluffy.

I will continue to poke around other readers and add some more in a later date.