If you are consuming lots of feeds, chances are you are using Google Reader. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t come up with a nice iPad interface yet. The iPhone web interface works on the iPad, but it’s not really as good as it could be. Fortunately, there’s a variety of native apps available on the App Store, giving you all the features necessary to enjoy browsing your feeds. One of them is Reeder for iPad. It comes at a price of $4.99, which is quite reasonable. As the name indicates, it’s not a universal app, which means you need to invest another $2.99, if you want to get Reeder for your iPhone.
The first step is to supply Reeder for iPad with your Google Account credentials. Then it will pull in all your feeds that you subscribe to with Google Reader and cache them for offline reading. That is basically all the setup necessary in order for you to read your feeds. If you checkout your iPad’s Settings app, you’ll find a bunch of additional options, such as how far back to sync your feeds and whether to show unread items as a badge on the app icon.
Next to the variety of options, probably the most impressive feature of Reeder for iPad is its user interface. It is simple and functional, exactly like you would expect it to be on an Apple device. If you want to read your feeds in landscape orientation, you’ll get an Apple Mail-like interface with a master-detail view. In portrait orientation, feeds are represented as a list.
The inital view in either orientation is a stack-like interface of your tags and folders, similar to the iPad’s Photo App, where you can pinch to peak inside or open the stack of feeds. In addition, you can filter your tags and folders based on starred, unread, or all items. On the left side of the screen you can find a toolbar which lets you mark all items as read or change the order in which items are listed.
When reading an item itself, you can follow links to other websites and basically browse without any limitations. Reeder for iPad even offers an additional feature over Safari: it pops up a little menu when you tap and hold any link, which lets you share the link, for example by email or Twitter.
Reeder for iPad is a worthy substitute for the clean and polished Google Reader web-interface. Its strength is the quite sophisticated and polished user interface, combined with a great attention to details.
