Things Change
I’m returning here to the subject of RSS Readers mainly because I wrote about them a year ago here and here and I feel as though those posts are now misleading of the the landscape that I now reside in. Not completely, but some clarification could be needed…should you be interested!
Around a year ago, probably just before the aforementioned posts were written, I was using NetNewsWire with Feedbin as my RSS gatherer. That had the additional bonus of Airshow as Feedbin’s delightfully lightweight podcast player on my iPhone. With time though I chose to drop Feedbin. I do not consume a lot of podcasts and I found that NewNewsWire’s iCloud integration was sufficient for my feed needs, so I said goodbye to Feedbin.
Then Vincent brought along Sublime Feed. This struck me as a very interesting way to consume my RSS feeds. In essence the feeds came in a stream, much like a social media feed would appear…one after the other. With time those feeds that I still had to read would disappear way down the line. I could choose to scroll back and find them, or simply let them go. Feeds that I considered very important or pertinent in that moment, I could pin to the top. I found this way of consuming feeds very compelling. I was not being bombarded, as it can feel to me, by numbers of unread feeds that were calling out to me to be read as more posts come in. Instead I could read what was in my immediate vision and let the others go unless I chose to scroll back and see what did lie further down the line. But I rarely did choose that. I just let the posts go. Letting go felt good.
Then along came The Iconfactory’s Tapestry and Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder 5. These for me appeared to be Sublime Feed turned into apps that I could run on my devices - albeit with a few more features thrown in. Sublime Feed runs in a browser and I simply preferred the app experience. It is at this point that the original posts that I mentioned at the top of this post come in. For the best part of a year I have bounced between Tapestry and Reeder. I was a Tapestry backer and so that did not leave my phone, I wanted to see where it was going, but I settled on Reeder, not least because it worked better on both my phone and laptop. The Iconfactory are still working on the MacOS integration.
And then out of blue I started playing around with regular RSS Readers again. No reason. I just found myself doing that.
I tried Feedbin out again, but “no," that was not what I was after.
I tried out NetNewsWire again, both with Feedbin and iCloud. But again, “no," it wasn’t feeling right and there were still some rough edges with NewNewsWire that I knew wouldn’t be sorted out for a while.
Then I downloaded Unread developed by John Brayton of Golden Hill Software. I had used Unread a few years ago before a MacOS version was available. The Mac version is now a fully developed app in its own right and Golden Hill now has its own Unread Cloud service for syncing across devices. After a few weeks of using Unread on both my devices I subscribed to gain access to all of its features. Yes I am seeing a lot of numbers in front of me of posts waiting to be read, but right now I am happy with that - no logic, it’s a funny world, Unread is working for me. To quote from one of my posts that I mentioned above,
for me it is like having a Sunday newspaper and making it last the week, consuming it at my own rate and in the way that I like to - sequentially, backwards/forwards, drilling down deeper into some sections.
Although right now I find it hard to believe that things will change - return here in a year’s time for the latest update!