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RSS and news apps make up one of the more crowded categories at the App Store, spanning the ranges of quality and price. Despite the abundance of RSS apps, they tend to all have similar feature sets, and differentiate themselves based on their interfaces (and often a few gimmicks). NewsBar enters this crowded market with a unique approach to displaying your news feeds, so let’s find out if it’s more than just another flashy fad RSS reader.
Ever since the release of the Mac App Store, I’ve been waiting for one specific category to take off: News apps. More specifically, innovative and free news apps.
This expectation isn’t some fanciful dream but something that arose out of a clear precedent: the iOS App Store. Today we’ll briefly discuss what the iOS App Store has in this area that the Mac App Store is desperately lacking and whether or not we can expect this void to continue in the future.
Browsing the App Store for a decent RSS app brings you little else than Reeder, which is an amazing app, and its hoard of clones, which tend to be not so amazing. As great as Reeder is, it seems to have given developers a mad case of tunnel vision that they just can’t get over.
For this reason, I’ve been pretty excited about Caffeinated, a soon to be released Google Reader client from Curtis Hard. Though it builds on the advancements of Reeder, it stands on its own as a gorgeous new take on the RSS reader. We recently got our hands on Caffeinated for a review, read on to see it in action.
It seems like there’s been an influx of RSS reader reviews here on AppStorm recently. With great new (and sometimes novel) readers like Pulp or Reeder, we can’t help but get excited about them. However, every now and then an RSS app comes out that doesn’t dabble with novel formats or unique interfaces. They set out to achieve the simple goal of utility, and do it well.
MobileRSS is a Google Reader client that has long been popular on iOS devices, and now comes to Mac. How does the desktop version hold up?
Keeping up with an RSS reader has become so boring and monotonous that many people just stopped using their usual Gruml or NetNewsWire apps a while ago. That is, until a small app called Reeder for Mac came along, bringing the beauty and simplicity of mobile apps to the RSS reader market.
The app that we are reviewing today is called Printful, and it aims to be sort of a Reeder on steroids. How well does it work? Let’s find out.
In the five hundred years following Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the first practical printing press in 1447, the methods through which people have received and digested news saw little change. The story of man has been chronicled by newspapers for generations and the tangible product of paper and ink faithfully recorded revolutions, inventions, tragedies, and triumphs for countless people.
Fast-forward to a mature Internet age and things are most definitely different. Newspapers still have an important place in society, but the patience required for reading each page is slowly dwindling, in favor of news as it happens. The continued adoption of the Internet as a medium of reporting has made the press more free than ever before, but the trade-off has been a perceived loss of quality in the reading experience. Pulp aims to change this by delivering an RSS App that combines the pleasing user experience of Gutenberg’s venerable creation with the speed, portability, and breadth of content only available in the Internet age.
I’ve been using Reeder since the very beginning, since back when it was just a wee little app with no subscription management or automatic refresh.
Since that first public beta, reeder has grown from a buggy iOS port to a fully-featured, beautiful Google Reader client. There’s no shortage of Mac RSS applications, and many have developed loyal fanbases across many niches. In this crowded market, can reeder really offer something new?
With the ever-increasing popularity of iPad apps such as Flipboard, and the impending decline of RSS, developers are becoming more and more aware that users want a new way to discover news online – Subscribing to feeds and trawling through thousands of stories is too time-consuming and isn’t a viable option in this modern world where time is everything. Users want to discover the news they want, and read it in an easy way.
This is where Mixtab comes in. Starting off as an iPad app, Mixtab has made the transition to Mac. Mixtab allows you to create tabs to browse news, based on what sort of news you’re looking for. There’s plenty of competition in this field, and I’m sure we’ll see even more in future years. So how does Mixtab compare? Read on to find out.
Keeping up with an RSS reader can be overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of feeds that you read. Sometimes it feels like RSS readers are more of a burden than they are helpful. There are many reader apps that know this, and try to take a minimalist, relaxed stance – but few accomplish it.
Today we are reviewing perhaps the simplest reader we’ve ever seen. It’s called Fresh Feed and it has a very interesting take on reader apps. Is it for you?
Brent Simmons, the author of inessential.com, has just released a new free version of popular RSS reeder NetNewsWire. It’s called NetNewsWire Lite and is available on the Mac App Store.
Stripped back and simplified is by far the best way to go with any ‘lite’ version of software as it gives new users an easy way into your software and, in the wake of some huge Mac App Store successes, can lead to increased interest in the full version.
Let’s have a look at whether it can work for NetNewsWire…
