Despite being a heavy user of RSS feeds, the announcement of Google killing their Reader app didn’t affect me much. While I used to use Reader a lot, since I moved to BlackBerry in 2010, I found that the lack of a single good, free RSS reader app that synced to Google Reader forced me to search for an alternative platform. That’s when I discovered BlackBerry News, a Blackberry-designed app that synced with my BlackBerry ID and allowed me to keep up with my favourite blogs and topics – except that it didn’t sync to Google’s services.
But my move to BlackBerry News mitigated my reliance on the Google Reader platform, to the extent that I wouldn’t even login to the service for months at a time.
Since Reader was axed on July 1st, and with the sudden renewed interest in RSS and reader apps, I decided to check out an alternative to Reader, just in case I wanted to stop using BlackBerry News, and also because I plan on moving away from the BlackBerry platform in a few months time and will be in need of a good reader.
That’s when I found out about Feedly. It’s a free, web-based service that is beautifully designed and also has apps for iPad and iPhone.
Feedly uses your Google account credentials to sign in, and allows you to add feeds by categories (so far I’ve got three categories – News, Tech and Business). You can read your feeds in various formats, including a Flipboard-esque “magazine” view.
Feedly has many traces of the old Google Reader design, which means that us veteran Reader users will feel right at home using it. But it’s also got some awesome new additions, such as a “Today” view that creates different “editions” with top stories collated in a beautiful interface.
I’m enjoying using Feedly, and look forward to trying it out on iOS soon.
Life in Pixels 