App Review: Reeder for iPad

Anybody who visits a lot of websites knows the value of an RSS feed. A quick refresher for those who don’t know: an RSS feed is simply a list of articles and their content that is updated when a new article is published. It makes keeping track of new articles on the sites you visit simple. Almost all websites offer these and most browsers support them.

Mobile Safari does not support RSS feeds, so you need a dedicated app that can do the job. Reeder is that app. There are plenty of RSS apps in the App Store, but Reeder is the most polished and easy to use.

It’s dead simple to set up if you have a Google Reader account- just enter your Google credentials and it will automatically pull in your RSS feeds from Google Reader. Within a few seconds, you will have all of your feeds imported and ready for browsing. If you don’t have a Google Reader account, things will be a little more difficult for you as you’ll have to add feeds manually.

There are some apps that try to collect your RSS feeds and add some social flare to them by connecting with your Twitter and Facebook accounts to make your news more social, such as Pinboard and Zite. Reeder doesn’t do any of that. It’s just a straight RSS reader. It does allow you to share items via a variety of services, including Twitter, Instapaper, and Delicious.

The sharing features are actually well thought out. There is a little arrow in the top right corner of each RSS entry that you tap, opening up a panel with all of the services you can share the item with. You can customize which services appear in this panel via the settings menu, so you only see the ones you want.

Reeder also gives you the ability to star items so you can save them for later. This is useful if you come across a product review and want to save it so you can order the product at a later date.

The only major complaint that we can think of is that there are two separate versions for the iPhone and the iPad. This means that you have to buy the app twice if you want it to work on both devices. While the iPhone version is only $2.99 (as opposed to the $4.99 the iPad version lists for), it still seems a little like a cash grab. Why not offer it as a universal app for $5.99 and split the difference? It would be well worth the money.

With it’s infinite customization options, Reeder is the perfect RSS app for those looking to just get their news without a whole bunch of other social networking distractions thrown in.

QUICK HITS:

• Syncs Quickly: Even with 1,000 new items, it will sync in a matter of seconds.
• Well Designed: The attention to detail shows.

RATING: 4.5/5