Feeddler App Review

I love Feed­dler­Pro. It’s an RSS reader for iOS devices, and was devel­oped by Chebin­liu. Some might con­sider it pricey for $4.99, but it is well worth it. I have bought and paid for close to 20 dif­fer­ent RSS read­ers, and tried dozens of free ones.  Feed­dler­PRO is tops in my book. It is eas­ily the #1 app on my iPhone & iPad right behind Ever­note and ahead of GoodReader for iPhone and GoodReader for iPad.

This order of pref­er­ence has noth­ing to do with func­tion­al­ity of these apps, but the fre­quency of which I open and use them. Try­ing to com­pare these apps would be like com­par­ing apples and oranges, their func­tions and rea­sons for exis­tence are so far apart, that to com­pare them to each other would be ludi­crous.  And since there can’t be two num­ber ones (thanks Ricky Bobby), I had to coose.

There isn’t an hour of my day that goes by where I don’t open up the app and check for new posts that have been added to my Google Reader feed.  Sun­days suck for me because there is never enough news for me to read.

I read some­where not too long ago that RSS was dead.  Who­ever said that didn’t have Feed­dler.  Or want to be able to cat­e­go­rize con­tent from var­i­ous web pages in ways that make it eas­ier for them to consume.

The con­text of that pre­vi­ous com­ment had to do with the explo­sion of social media as a means of spread­ing news and attract­ing traf­fic to your site.  Sites like Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn and more are all great gen­er­a­tors of traf­fic that can bring users to your site.  Post a tweet with a short link on Twit­ter and fol­low­ers will click on it to see the con­tent. Not a bad way to gen­er­ate traf­fic for sure.  I per­son­ally don’t like con­sum­ing infor­ma­tion that way.  Why?  Too many clicks to get to the data and info I want.

Imag­ine this: You’re on Twit­ter, you see a link from a friend, you open it in a new page or win­dow, you check it out, you close it, you go back to twit­ter, find another link, rinse; repeat. Now add Face­book . Google+ or any other social news feed and you have really strong rea­son why we are so ADD in this country.

Because you have to click a link, and theñ a new browser win­dow opens up I know you can fol­low the same sites on Twit­ter and Face­Book and Google+ (and now Google+ Pages) but it’s a bit incon­ve­nient to have to use what ever your client is and click a link to have that con­tent open in a new win­dow, read it, close it, and then move to the next item.

Feed­dler cap­tures the arti­cles and posts on sites form the sites’s RSS feeds and put it in a really nice, ele­gant for­mat for users to con­sume. A sin­gle list of arti­cles that i can nav­i­gate with no dis­trac­tions and no need to click all over the place to get my read­ing on.

It inte­grates with Google Reader, and you can add other feeds directly to the app.  Sync­ing your favorite arti­cles and shar­ing is easy with Feed­dler. What you star and share in Feed­dler, shows up in Google Reader. NICE!

Shar­ing couldn’t be any eas­ier as Feed­dler can inte­grate with Email, Face­book, Twit­ter,  Deli­cious, Tum­blr and other social media chan­nels like pin­board, Rea­d­it­Later, Instapa­per and Evernote.

Nav­i­gat­ing, sav­ing, shar­ing, and favorit­ing arti­cles from your favorite sites couldn’t be any eas­ier either  just con­fig­ure the sup­ported accounts in the Feed­dler app, and whey of want to share, tap the for­ward­ing icon and select your chan­nel of choice.

And while the app is intu­itive, friendly, and easy to use, I still think there’s room for improvement.

Shar­ing an arti­cle in Feed­dler can only be done with one ser­vice at a time. Mean­ing that if you of want to share with Face­book and Twit­ter, you have to tap each ser­vice sep­a­rately. So after shar­ing on Twit­ter, you have to go through the process again and share on Face­book. Com­bin­ing these tasks so that I get a menu to select from would means that I could post to mul­ti­ple Channel’s at the same time.

Inte­gra­tion with social aggre­ga­tors like Hoot­Suite and Ping.fm doesn’t exist either.  You can send an email to the ser­vice, but that’s not as tight an inte­gra­tion as it is with Twit­ter or Face­book.  What would be really cool if (and a great time saver) if these ser­vices could be added to the mix. Per­haps then we wouldn’t needed add another layer of com­plex­ity to this really great app as we could use those ser­vices to broad­cast. This will be espe­cially inter­est­ing now that Hoot­Suite can inte­grates with 3rd party ser­vices like Tum­blr. Click here for more on that.

More than any­thing else, I use Feedler to save arti­cles and feeds to Ever­note. Ever­note is great because it allows me to save any kind of data (text, files, pic­tures, PDFs, and many more) to the cloud. It also allows me to save dif­fer­ent types of con­tent to dif­fer­ent note­books so that I can keep my infor­ma­tion organized.

Exam­ple: I am writ­ing this post in Ever­note, and I have cap­tured all ref­er­enced links and images in same note in my note­book called blog posts.

What I would really like to see is the abil­ity to extend the Ever­note inte­gra­tion a bit fur­ther. Cur­rently, Feed­dler saves all arti­cles you for­ward to Ever­note into your default Ever­note note­book. This is okay, but en I have to open Ever­note, and then move my con­tent to the appro­pri­ate note­book or stack of note­books. It’s an extra step, and one that I think Feed­dler could elim­i­nate for me by giv­ing me the option to select the note­book I want to save the arti­cle into. Then I don’t have to go back and orga­nize, and more impor­tantly, I won’t have to leave the app. +1 for that idea.

Of course, this could also be a lim­i­ta­tion in the Ever­note API. Other apps that inte­grate with Ever­note only dump con­tent to the default Ever­note note­book, so I don’t think this is a Feed­dler issue. In fact, based on the developer’s his­tory, if Ever­note makes this a real­ity, I am sure he’d add the fea­ture to Feeddler.

Since iOS 5, there have been some instances where the app has crashed, or has had issues with reync­ing data. I am spec­u­lat­ing that it might have  some­thing to do with the changes in iOS 5 that Marco Arma­ment (cre­ator of InstaPa­per) wrote about recently. You can find that arti­cle on IOS Cache Clear­ing here.  I will fur­ther spec­u­late that the com­ments in Feeddler’s release notes on the App Store will address that.

The last item I’ll bring up is a big one. There is no search func­tion in the app itself. I have over 3000 starred arti­cles in my Google Reader Starred items. For me to find any­thing, I have to open up the web app and search there. I really don’t like doing that as the web  inter­face for Reader on mobile devices isn’t great.  Why not let me search my saved/starred arti­cles right inside the Feed­dler app? Per­haps there’s no way to lever­age the reader API to do such a thing. After all, there is no pub­licly avail­able API for reader, and what inte­gra­tion has been done has been dri­ven by trial and error, dis­cov­ery (oh wow look at that!) and com­mu­nity sup­port. I don’t fault the devel­oper of Feed­dler here at all. He’s doing the best he can with what he knows, and by his prod­uct, he knows alot.

All in all Feed­dler is a very respectable app, and the sup­port and response from the devel­oper has always been top notch. And they have always been recep­tive to feed­back. The app itself is pol­ished and well thought out and I do enthu­si­as­ti­cally rec­om­mend it to any­one who is look­ing for a solid Rss reader for your iOS device.

4.8 out of 5 stars for me. The .2 deduc­tion is or the rea­sons I stated above, if it inte­grated with Hoot­Suite, offered the abil­ity to post to mul­ti­ple ser­vices at once, and allowed me to pick what note­book I could post an arti­cle to (more of an Ever­note issue), and had built in search I’d give it a 6 out of 5 stars.