If there’s one application type we rely on around here it’s RSS readers. We go through them pretty fast. They’ve almost become the new twitter client for us.
A while back I wrote an article about how I use my RSS readers on my iPad, and in that article I mentioned Reeder as my “work” reader of choice. Today, the Reeder team made doing my job a little bit easier by releasing Reeder for the Mac Beta.
The beta, while a little buggy, certainly takes the iOS philosophy to OS X. It’s clean, simple, and provides most of the options that the other versions do.
The application is still in beta, so you can expect bug fixes and patches for the next little while.
Quickly, one bug that we noticed was that one of our feeds keeps dumping a bunch of old posts into Reeder. It could be on our end, and we’re looking into it, but we’ve never noticed it before. One feature that stood out for us was the ability to set the interval you want Reeder to refresh your news in the applications preferences. Covering news is hard enough without having to wait 15-20minutes for updates. Reeder lets you set the refresh rate as low as 5 minutes—that’s pretty huge.
I’d also like to see the inclusion of a URL shortner. Reeder does give you the ability to copy links, but there would be value added in letting me plug in my bit.ly credentials and automagically shortening the url.
With that in mind, this is a beta, and things could change, although when an application usually gets the “Beta” label, it means that the features are set, and the developer is looking to iron out the bugs.
It’s definitely worth checking out. You can download the beta here. Also, if you’re interested in downloading the iOS app, you can get it on the App Store (iPad, iPhone).
Update: This app is not yet feature complete according to Silvio Rizzi. They are planning on adding some additional things before the App sheds its Beta tag.
