I feed, I hunger

[roadrunnertwice]

So I use an RSS reader to keep up with comics, blogs, essays, music, and a certain amount of srs bsns. At some point over the last five years, all RSS readers got eaten by Google Reader, and those that remained all used Google Reader to sync across devices. Then Google killed off Reader at the start of this month and everything was thrown into disarray and all my shit (NetNewsWire across a couple computers and an iPad) stopped working. Booooo.

Now I get to play with a bunch of not-totally-satisfactory newcomers to try and find something I don't mind. Supposedly my formerly beloved NetNewsWire is going to have SOME unspecified syncing solution and new mobile apps at SOME unspecified time, but Black Pixel missed the July 1 bricking deadline. Which kind of blew the goodwill I was holding out for them, and as far as I'm concerned they're starting from square zero with me, since a bunch of other folk have things that actually work today. They could well win anyway, but NNW can't be my path of least resistance anymore.

Anyway, first up is Digg Reader, just because what? Digg? That's a thing again? And because it was free. I've used it for three days or so by now.

I really like the per-article experience in their iPad app; it's enjoyable to read with, and it's easy to move back and forth between the naked feed version and the full website version of a post. And at first, when everything was unread because my shit had been broken for days, the experience of moving between articles was pretty nice too, with that scroll-to-the-bottom-and-keep-scrolling control.

Alas, less so when you have a mix of read and unread stuff. There's no "next unread" control, so you have to go back to the list and search through the haystack when you start hitting repeats. The read and unread articles only differ by font weight in the list view, so there isn't a blue dot or anything I can scan for, and I can't distinguish font weights when scrolling at speed. The unread counts in the source list are kind of wonky and unreliable. And the keep-scrolling-to-next control, which I like when I'm reading a whole list, is kind of crap if you decide to move on without finishing the current article; too much scrolling for what should be one button-press.

The web interface is just like Google Reader, but again, it doesn't let you filter down to just unread articles, so you have to manually search for 'em if there's a mix.

All that's awkward enough that I don't think I'll stick with it. What should I try next?

Comments

[silvainshadows]

You should try Feedly. It's incredibly similar to Google Reader, I've been using it since Google announced they were shutting Google Reader down and it's been excellent. It's also one of those that makes it fairly easy to move between the feed and the webpage in their app (or, at least, the android version, IDK what they have for iPad). Moving to next is done by sideways swipe, closing an article is done by scrolling down to the end and on or by hitting the back button either in the app (a little green shape- the feedly logo- with a back arrow next to it) or on your device. The app's back arrow is also how to get back to a feed from the webpage of it. (Note- all of this may be entirely wrong on an iPad, the only Apple device I have is an iPod shuffle, but I assume they'd aim for similar design to their iPad app.)

...there is, however, a weird quirk where sometimes things I've read are mysteriously marked unread when I switch between devices in one day, but unless it's a lot of them, that's not a huge issue, and as far as I know may be limited to the Android app. Also, it may just be me.

[roadrunnertwice]

Cool, thanks for the recommendation -- Feedly's def. on the list to try.

[kate_nepveu]

I'm running Tiny Tiny RSS on my own domain, which is web-based for desktop, and it works on iOS via Reeder: http://tt-rss.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1981 . Want an account, either just to play with or permanently? All I need is an email address.

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh! Yeah, I'd love to poke at it, I hadn't even heard of that one yet. Thank you! My email is nick.fagerlund@gmail.com.

[kate_nepveu]

Email sent!