Reeder : Google Reader for iPhone

November 13, 2009 in General, iPhone/iPad/iPod by Angelina Roberts

They say variety is the spice of life and this week sees an update to Reeder a brilliant little RSS application to spice up your reading habits on iPhone or iPod Touch. Reeder, now at version 1.1 syncs directly with Google Reader.

As a massive fan of Byline (read our review) any mobile RSS reader is going to have to be pretty good to impress and after a few days use I can say Reeder really does hold its own as an impressive yet amazingly simple mobile application. 

Less is More

Reeder offers a really effective and intuitive user interface yet manages to pack a lot of punch in terms of displaying, managing, and sharing news content in the palm of your hand.

Like NetNewsWire and Byline Reeder requires a Google Reader account. If you haven’t moved to Google Reader for syncing your RSS subscriptions it really is worth considering especially if you use a number of computers or  iPhone / Touch.

On first run Reeder will prompt you to enter your Google username and password. Each time you load Reeder it will attempt to sync with Google, if you would prefer Reeder didn’t sync each time you run the application you can turn this option off in the main settings of your iPhone.

Like other pocket RSS readers Reeder pulls the favicon for each website and uses it as an icon in the feed list. If you view your news ordered by feed rather than date this results in a really nice presentation.

Reeder formats and displays articles in a way (in my opinion) makes news content really easy to read and navigate. You can mark an entire list as read although there doesn’t appear to be a quick way of marking off individual articles. I subscribe to around 300 feeds and quite often race through my Byline interface marking items I am not interested in as read but this doesn’t see to be possible in Reeder.

As you can imagine with 300 feeds I have created a number of groups, Apple, Photography, Design etc. Feeder handles groups brilliantly and like Byline only displays Groups on the front page that contain new content.

Share

When reading a news item Reeder offers Instapaper, Read it later and Delicious support allowing you to quickly and easily share your news discoveries with other platforms. The share options are really well implemented and with two clicks I can have a link appearing in my Delicious list.

Notes:
This allows you to make in-app comments about a particular news article. Once you create a note a new ‘notes’ tab appears on the front page of the application with a list of all your comments. Opening a note not only displays your text but also a direct link to the Article.

Delicious | Instapaper |ReaditLater
These options allows one click share to the three most popular bookmarking sites for both public and private sharing. The first time you share with a service you are prompted to enter your username and password.

If you need to change these later you can do so in the Reeder section under your iPhone ‘Settings” option.

Email
As well as being able to email a link to a relevant article you can also email the entire article in the body of the message. I have moved to using this option on a regular basic sending articles to colleagues as it is quick, easy and allows them to read and reply without actually leaving Mail.app (or equivalent).

Conclusion

As an RSS reader I really love the way Reeder manages and displays both my subscriptions and individual news items. Although I can’t mark individual items as read without actually reading them (I see the irony) I still think Reeder will see some serious use over the weeks ahead.

Will it replace Byline ? well like Twitter clients where I now have four installed I suspect I will be running Reeder and Byline in tandem for sometime to come.

I am not sure if 59p is an introductory price but even at £2.99 I would still highly recommend this application to anyone with an iPhone and a Google Reader account. Get it while you can (iTunes link)