Reeder‪.‬ 17+

I delayed trying this because I am a massive Reeder classic user. But now that I have, I can reassure all of those coming from Classic that this is a great app. It still needs some minor refinements, and there is a getting used to it, but I am really enjoying the new version and experience without the unread counts, replaced by the saved scroll position. Despite what you read in early reviews about scroll positions not working or syncing well, I can confirm it works seamlessly now between Mac, iPad , and iPhone. My only request and the reason for four stars is that it lacks a iPhone widget. I am used to seeing a feed of news stories on widgets on my phone now and have gone so far as to remove application icons from my home screen in favor of widgets. I am not seeing widgets for this new version of Reeder at this time unless I am missing something. Definite five stars when it adds widgets.

This is a neat idea that plays into the notion that we can’t 100% our feeds anymore and thus don’t need to see that we have thousands of unread RSS feed entries (and videos, and Reddit posts, and so on and on) we’ll never get to. As a complement to Reeder Classic (but, personally, not a replacement for it), I can easily see a use case that has me using both daily. But I won’t pick this up again until there’s some visual indication of which posts I’ve read/seen/watched/heard. A syncing timeline isn’t enough (and, so far in my testing, not very reliable in terms of where it lands after a sync). I don’t need unread item counts or empty feed folders, but please just dim the items I’ve interacted with (or, better, give us an option to automatically hide those from the main feed once they’ve been interacted with). Without that option, this feels way more unwieldy than a large list of unread feeds in Classic, and I’ve only loaded up about four feeds so far. A small fix, even if it’s off by default but available as an option, will go a long way.

Coming from reeder 5, there are two items that are holding me back from making the switch. Beyond that I think this app has a good start at simplifying the way information is consumed. It also adds some capabilities that were missing in reeder 5 that for me were much needed. The first thing that this app is missing is some indication that a new article is available to read. I get the need to not show a count but something like bolding the folder or feed source title would make all the difference. If you are looking for ideas you could make the title glow yellow to play off of the cool new lightening app icon. The second item is that there is no way to easily transition from one feed or folder into another. Reeder 5 allows you pull past the last article in the feed to move to the next feed or folder. That was really slick and kept you in the flow of reading content. Looking forward to updates in the future. Keep up the great work.