Reeder 3.0 for the iPhone was released a few days ago, heralded by Federico Viticci's review on MacStories.net.
Reeder has been my main RSS feed reader since it was released. Actually since each separate version was released — I own licences for the iPhone, iPad and OS X version.
Despite some minor annoyances the UI of all apps is second to none and it's easily one of the most heavily used apps on all my devices.
The UI of the new iPhone version is nothing short of spectacular and works very well, even though it's a bit laggy at times (I'm sure this is something that will be improved in a future release).
I'm not going to review the entire application, Mr. Viticci has done a thoroughly good job with that. What I want to mention is the integration of Fever as the first true alternative to Google Reader since the demise of Newsgator as a publicly available RSS aggregator.
Shaun Inman's service might be a bit more difficult to set up for the average user and it requires a web server (you buy a licence for the Fever software which then has to be hosted on your server), but for me it has three advantages:
- It works perfectly fine as a regular feed catching service,
- it's marquee feature ranks posts by importance and popularity based on several criteria, presenting the user with a "you don't have time to read all entries, but these you shouldn't miss" listing (more on this here),
- and using Fever is going to eliminate the last reason for me to have a Google account.
The one thing keeping me from buying some web space, a Fever licence and setting it up right this second, is the absence of a good Fever client for the iPad. As of now it's also unclear when Reeder's developer Silvio Rizzi will release Reeder for iPad 3.0.
I also hope that by the time Mr. Ricci has Reeder 3.0 for iPad ready to go, the app will also support in-app feed management for Fever accounts, which it currently doesn't and receive a better visual implementation of Fever's ranking feature (both are things the MacStories review criticises).
For the time being I'm going to enjoy reading my RSS in Reeder 3.0 for the iPhone, and I somehow get the feeling that it's going to be used more often than the iPad app.
