Review: Reeder for iPad

"Reeder" offers an elegant interface for reading news feeds funneled through Google Reader.

What sets "Reeder" apart from other App Store competitors is it really takes advantage of the iPad interface and multi-touch capabilities. Instead of the long list of folders and articles that the Google Reader web site or other apps offer, the news feeds are instead organized to look like the photo albums in the iPad’s photo app. The “stacks” of the feed’s folders can be opened and closed through tapping, pinching or swiping.

Once you have accessed the individual articles they can be easily navigated by swiping up and down. In landscape mode there is also a navigation bar on the left side of the screen that lists recent articles. They can be opened individually by tapping on the one you wish to read.

A series of finger swipes help control navigating the feeds once you get deeper inside of the app. Swiping to the right can mark a story as read or unread, while swiping to the left can “star” it (starred articles are saved in another section for later viewing).

If you have a heavy load of feeds, there are options to customize whether the articles are cached to your iPad only over Wi-Fi or if you want to load it up over 3G also.

There are also plenty of additional services tied in to "Reeder." An article can be sent to Instapaper, Delicious, Twitter, and most of the popular file-sharing or saving applications. By tapping a menu icon, any of your articles can be sent through one of these services. The list can also be customized in the settings menu. If you prefer to read articles without all the annoying ads or graphics then there is an option to enable opening all articles in Instapaper or Google Mobilizer.

While the photo-like interface is nice, it can be a bit bland given that feed-containing folders are blank. The only other downside was that once you open one of the folders, the feeds are not broken down by source – it’s just one long list.

Unfortunately "Reeder" is not a so-called universal app, so if you bought the iPhone version ($2.99) you will need to pay again for the iPad edition ($4.99).

Price: $4.99

File Size: 2.1 MB

Developer: Silvio Rizzi

Platform: iPad

iPadNewsDaily Rating (out of 4): ★★★ 1/2

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