Shawn Blanc on iPhone feed readers.
The predicament with feed reading apps is most certainly not in the quantity of the selections; rather, the quality. This is not to say that most of the legitimate feed reading apps on the iPhone have not been developed with care — but as agents of delivery for my favorite authors, and as contrivances meant for enjoying lengthy bits of text, I prefer a simple app that does less and does it better.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’m currently using Fever, mostly because I really enjoy the desktop browser version. That being said, the iPhone version licks balls and I only continue with it because it keeps everything synced.
This isn’t a huge problem for me so much as a general annoyance. In truth, I tend to spend more time reading longer content saved to Instapaper Pro on my iPhone than I do checking my feeds. That’s the reason I use Instapaper. My concern is how I’ll handle feed reading once the iPad is released, since I’m very hopeful that will be the device where the bulk of my feed ingestion happens. I can’t see the desktop version of Fever being a great iPad experience (though I could be wrong) and using the iPhone interface is very much a non-starter for me.
I’m hoping Shaun Inman has a plan that will satisfy me and make Fever awesome on the iPad. If not, I’ll have to find another tool, and I’d be willing to drop Fever for Google Reader on my desktop if it ensures proper feed syncing.
