Choosing a RSS App

[RMD68]

I know we live in a world with a plethora of social media sites that offer numerous feed sources, but I still want to be able to make my own feed source, so I'm looking for a great RSS app.

I'm looking at 3 apps, Leaf, NewsBar, and ReadKit, but I'm open to other apps as well.

There are a few things that I'm looking for in such an app:
1) Functionality across OSX an iOS
2) Ability to organize favorite articles to archive because I don't like a cluttered browser bookmark menu
3) Ease of Use
4) The App does not need to have RSS publishing features since I only intend to use the App for news sources but not publishing my own material

If there are any other features I could consider, I'm all ears.

Thank you for the help!

 

[jaseone]

Feedbin.me

 

[srminton]

Try the Beta of Reeder for Mac: http://reederapp.com/mac/

It has a few bugs because, well, it's a Beta. But it's very promising, nicely-designed, and is especially nice if you also use Reeder for iOS.

Leaf is nice, but not to everyone's taste because it puts all of your articles into a stream, more like Twitter than a traditional RSS app. Readkit is more traditional and has the most options to integrate with different services like Feedly, Feedbin, Pocket, Instagram, Feed Wrangler, and so on. You can also use it as a standalone RSS reader. Leaf also works with Feedly, or as a standalone. Readkit is probably better if you have lots of subscriptions and want to browse efficiently, one by one. Leaf is fast, if you just want to zip through a stream of articles. Haven't tried NewsBar, but it looks more like Leaf. Oh, and Leaf doesn't have its own browser, so it will kick you out to Safari/Chrome/Firefox if you want to open a website linked from the article. Readkit and Reeder will open a website inside the app, which is nice in full-screen mode.

I'd recommend Reeder, even in Beta. Plus, it's currently free to try. Or if you're a fan of the Twitter firehose style of reading, you might prefer Leaf. It's blazing fast.

 

[CarlJ]

I was an enthusiastic user of Reeder (both Mac and iOS) on top of Google Reader, until the Reeder dev missed the shutdown of Google Reader.

Tried most of the viable-looking alternatives (FeedBin, FeedWrangler, Fever), and ended up going with Feedly. Happily paid Feedly money as soon as they let me (because I wanted a solution that would stick around), canceling my FeedBin and FeedWrangler memberships (I'd paid the first year on both, and bought Fever). I would definitely recommend Feedly as the underlying engine, regardless of what front-end you use.

Reeder now has a published iOS client and beta Mac client (as mentioned above) that work with Feedly, and I understand that folks like ReadKit on Mac a lot (it talks Feedly, but I don't know how well it handles it, having only used it for read-later services - Readability/Instapaper/Pocket - and then not a lot, doing most of my reading on iOS).

I've ended up sticking with the Feedly website in Safari on my Mac, and the official Feedly client on iOS - I like the presentation, and it fulfills one of my primary requirements, having the control of dividing my feeds into folders (by topic) and then going through one folder or feed at a time, rather than "here's the firehose" approach, or trying to guess for me what I want to read / should read / feel like reading. Feedly offers sending/sharing to a handful of read-later and archive services, though Reeder was (and probably still is) the king of offering access to every service ever invented (on the Mac, with the Feedly website, I tend to just command-click articles into a new tab if I think I want to do something additional to them, then go through the opened tabs, and click various buttons in Safari's toolbar to send them off to read later or archive, if I still feel the need after seeing the full page - I think having super-easy buttons for that in Reeder encouraged me to queue up a lot of articles that I didn't actually want to take the time to read). I also like that paying Feedly users get to vote on what features they should work on next.

I should probably take another look at Reeder, but I've been happy using the base Feedly interface for quite some time now. So, in short (too late), I'd say definitely use Feedly as the back-end, consider Reeder for the front-end.

 

[Weaselboy]

I'm looking at 3 apps, Leaf, NewsBar, and ReadKit, but I'm open to other apps as well.

There are a few things that I'm looking for in such an app:
1) Functionality across OSX an iOS
2) Ability to organize favorite articles to archive because I don't like a cluttered browser bookmark menu
3) Ease of Use

I don't think either Leaf or Newsbar are really full featured RSS readers IMO. I could see either as a supplement for your main RSS reader... but not as your only RSS client.

I have been using Readkit and am very happy with it. I don't see a way to archive articles permanently, but you can set it to keep read articles for up to ten weeks. There is a nice "smart folder" system you can use to divert subjects you are interested in over to their own folder.

I think for archiving you would be better off using something like Pocket. Pocket (as well as some other similar services) are integrated into Readkit. So if you see an article you want to save just hit your configured Pocket KB shortcut and it gets saved to Pocket for later. Pocket also has an iOS app.

I have been using Newsify on iOS and syncing it to Readkit with Feedly.

Hope this helps.