A decent RSS client is one of those must-have applications in my experience (if you value keeping up with anything on the Internet that is), something that let’s you quickly sort the wheat from the chaff, save time by not having to browse sites individually, and consolidate all that information flow into one place on your desktop / mobile device.
For the past couple of years I’ve been content with Newsfire on the Mac, and getting by using Popurls.com when I’m on anything else (including my iPhone). This all changed for me though when Shaun Inman (of Mint fame) released Fever, an application that takes a fresh approach to managing large volumes of data that result from subscribing to numerous RSS feeds.
Firstly I should say that it’s not a desktop application in the traditional sense, although you can treat it as such. It’s actually PHP / MySQL based, the idea being you host it yourself on your own server but if push comes to shove you can of course install it on your desktop (easy on OS X, not so much on Windows). It has a pretty web-based interface that’s also optimised for the iPhone (more on that in a minute), and when combined with SSB technologies such as Fluid.app or Prism it’s a close call to discern it from any other ‘normal’ application. The former even updates the icon in your dock to show unread post count, for example.
Visual goodness aside, two things sold this to me. The first being how Fever manages your feeds – Shaun has created an interesting analogy by having two different ‘types’ of feeds, ‘Kindling’ and ‘Sparks’. Essentially, Kindling are those websites that you consider to be pretty much essential, sites with unique content and editorials that you regularly check out on a daily basis. Sparks are the sites that basically just link elsewhere and whose purpose is mainly to propagate content rather than generate anything unique. Stuff like Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz and so on fall into this category for me. Fever’s party piece is to consolidate these two into a hot list, aggregating the really popular links that appear in your Sparks and Kindling thus raising their profile (or temperature if you want to stick to the analogy) in this hot list. Once you’ve got a few things on the go it ends up looking like this.
The other selling point for me was the iPhone optimised interface. I’ve been waiting for what seems like an eternity for a port of Newsfire, with the author promising that it’s coming “some day”, but I’ve pretty much given up hope. No need now though – check out how Fever looks, it’s swish:
Anyway, it’s all detailed over at the Fever homepage and there’s even a video to watch which does a far, far better job of explaining how it works than I could ever do.
All in all I’m pretty impressed. It might seem like a relatively steep purchase at $30 in these times of super cheap deals on the App Store, especially considering you have to host it yourself, but given the thought behind this application and the polished quality of implementation I think it’s a bargain.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }