Transitioning to Fever for RSS
We’ve got the final three weeks of Google Reader ahead of us, and if you haven't made up your mind about which alternative service to use, now might be good time to start thinking about it.
I decided to go with Fever, the self hosted service developed by Shaun Inman. To use fever you need a hosting environment that runs PHP and provides a MySQL database. It costs a one time fee of $30 which will give you free updates until the next major version.
Fever does the Google Reader thing where you can have your feeds sorted into categories (or tags, or whatever you want to call them). But Fever also provides so called "Hot Links" - websites that a lot of other websites link to. The "other" websites are called "Sparks" - usually high volume feeds or link blogs (such as Daring Fireball and the like) to which you are subscribed. Sparks never count against your unread count, as their only purpose is to "kindle" your other feeds and provide the hot links.
Hot links didn't work very well for me. It might be useful if you’re in a hurry and just want to check on the hottest topics. But even for this case it sometimes doesn't work as one would hope. For example, if there are a lot of links to apple.com in my sparks, apple.com will be at the top of my hot links list, which isn't very useful without the context. So I decided to use Fever like I used Google Reader: as a feed directory and syncing backend.
For me, a service lives and dies with the apps that support it. And Reeder supporting Fever in the iPhone version was a major point for me to try Fever. I love Reeder in all its incarnations (iPhone, iPad and OS X) - it's beautiful and fits my work flow perfectly. Fever support for the iPhone version was already part of the 3.0 release, and it's supposed to come to the iPad and OS X version, too.
Since it's only a month now until Google Reader will be shut down, and Fever support in Reeder for Mac and iPad will not be ready until then, I was looking for alternative Fever clients.
On OS X there's Webin's ReadKit which looks very promising. To be honest, it looks a bit too promising, because if you squint your eyes it's almost indistinguishable from Reeder. So while the UI may not be very innovative it's still a great UI and it looks beautiful. There are still some flaws in the Fever integration, for example ReadKit syncs Fever’s sparks but not the hot links. Sparks without the hot links don’t make much sense as their only purpose is to "kindle" your other feeds. Also ReadKit counts sparks in the unread count which makes the unread count pretty useless at the moment. I asked Webin about this, and they said that an option to ignore sparks in the unread count will be part of a future update.
As I intend to use Fever only "Google Reader style" I don’t care for hot links right now, but it would be nice to have them synced in addition to the normal feed directories. I guess that also is just a question of some future update.
ReadKit provides another feature that's very important to me: native integration of a "mobilizer". ReadKit supports Readability for this purpose, just like Reeder. I am subscribed to some feeds that don't offer full text, so it's a convenient way to read those articles without having to go to the website. In case you do want to visit the website there's a browser view available that opens when you click on a headline.
One essential feature that's missing from ReadKit at the moment is a "Mark all as read" function. The only way to do this right now is to select one item, hit cmd+A on the keyboard to select all items and hit "A" to mark the selected items as read. A "Mark all as read" button would make life a lot easier here. [Update: While I wrote this, version 2.0.1 was released which adds the "Mark all as read" button.]
Of course let’s not forget where ReadKit comes from: Before version 2.0 its main feature was (and probably still is) to access several read-later-services such as Instapaper or Pocket. I use Instapaper, and this works great with ReadKit. (You must be an Instapaper subscriber to use Instapaper with any third party apps. I'm not sure about Pocket and the other supported services.) There's just one little flaw: My Instapaper favorites are only visible if I turn on ’Show read bookmarks’. In my opinion favorites should be visible regardless of their read or unread state.
I think I'll stick with ReadKit on OS X for the near future - or at least until Reeder for Mac will be updated with Fever integration. While ReadKit is a solid app that does many things right, Reeder for Mac wins when you go deeper and discover all the little details and niceties, such as trackpad gestures. But let's not forget that this is ReadKit's first version with Fever integration and there sure are some updates in the pipeline that will add some of the missing features.
That leaves Fever on the iPad. I tried Sunstroke which was recently updated to support the iPad. It has by far the best support of Fever specific features, as it was built from the ground up as a Fever client, and nothing else. I think it's okay and will do until Reeder for iPad supports Fever. It just misses some polish. But I will keep my eyes open for other more polished iPad Fever clients.
I guess I'm ready for July 1st. Farewell, Google Reader!
