Christian Cantrell, an Adobe employee and editor of WatchReport just sent me a link to his latest project. It’s called Apprise Reader and it’s basically a feed reader with two very compelling features.
On the surface, Apprise Reader hits all the right buttons: Adobe Air, Twitter, AIM, RSS. It is, at its core, a feed reader with a dead simple interface. It accepts standard OPML files to import feeds and runs natively on Windows and OS X – Linux support is coming soon.
All of this by itself should make it worth the download but wait, there’s more. Apprise is in beta right now and it’s completely free. You can easily send links from the feed reader to Twitter or to any of your AIM friends. You could also conceivably edit the code to add in any destination you could imagine including blogs and micro-blogs like Tumblr. You simply enter your credentials and Twitter and AIM icons light up on top of the window. Tapping them sends the story to its respective destination.
Sure, it’s not earth-shattering but this is one of the first standalone readers I’ve seen to be able to do this. It’s a powerful and compelling addition to the standard feed-reader repertoire and sure to be soon replicated.
Isn’t there a Google Reader API? Why aren’t any apps utilizing that? If this app could both synch up with my Google Reader and integrate with Twitter and AIM, they would have a sure winner. Until then, it’s much easier for me (and my system) to open Google Reader when I’m reading feeds.
Second that…but I think the Reader API is “undocumented.”
Importing from Google is already on our list for future versions. We wanted to get it into 1.0, but just didn’t have time. Very good suggestion.
Thanks,
Christian
Uhm, why does it have to be Adobe AIR though…?! I’m trying, but I just can’t get myeslf to like those apps on my Mac…but I’m probably just weird that way…!?
Somehow they never really ‘look and feel’ right, kind of like those dreadful Java apps, even though they are not nearly as ugly…still for some reson I prefer “real” native Mac apps…! But I suppose the main reason for choosing AIR is the multi-platform compatibility or so…?! Not a coder, so I don’t really know if that’s it…
Mile,
I’ve gotten so accustomed to using web apps that I don’t really have a specific look and feel expectations anymore. That’s one thing that’s so great about web apps. You can do anything you can figure out how to do with HTML/JS/CSS/Flash. AIR is just a way to run those apps on the desktop rather than in your browser. I think some people expect their desktop apps to look and behave like all their other desktop apps. You can do that in AIR, but I think part of the beauty of AIR is the ability to break out of that and provide a more unique user experience.
Christian
hmm.. well, i will give it a try then..
Still waiting for AIR’s Linux support.. I keep hearing that it is coming soon, but apart from the 1.0 alpha some months ago I haven’t seen any progress report in a while.. By the looks of it Linux will always sit behind the Windows/Mac versions or am I wrong?
Marco,
We are actively working in Linux support. Unfortunately I can’t specify dates, but we take Linux very seriously, and will achieve and maintain feature parity.
Christian
Well I tried it out on my Macbook running OS X 10.5.4 and here are my thoughts:
-Copy and past shortcuts didn’t work. I had to manually enter the URLs. Quite annoying.
-How about TinyURL (or a similiar service) integration for posting to Twitter. Adding the feedburner links to Twitter use up over 40% of the allowed characters.
-I added a feed. Read a few then “Marked all as read”. Closed the program, opened it up and it said I had 44 new messages, of which I had just barely marked them all as read.
Overall it looks nice but due to the above quirks won’t make it as a permanent app for me.
Thanks for your comments.
- You’re right about copy and paste shortcuts not working; that’s a good suggestion, and something we’ll fix. If you copy the URL and then click ‘add feed,’ however, it will paste it in automatically.
- Twitter itself only allows posts of 140 characters, but it converts links automatically with TinyURL; we anticipate that, and this is why you can actually type 160 characters in the Send Twitter window. We may add a button, however, to shorten the URL with TinyURL or a similar service.
- If you click ‘Mark all as read’ and you immediately close the app, it is possible that the database will not be updated with that information. This is because Apprise queues up the database queries to improve performance, and closing it immediately after choosing that option runs the risk of not updating the db. How quickly did you close the app after clicking that button? I can’t get this to happen unless I close it less than a second afterwords.
Thanks for responding Daniel. I actually didn’t realize that Twitter auto-converts URLs. Good to know!
As far as the ‘Mark all as read’ issue, I clicked the button, looked around the program for a little bit, then closed it. Probably took 15-20 seconds.
Hmm, that’s definitely longer than anything I’ve seen. Are there any more details you can give me, so I can recreate this bug? How many feeds/folders do you have? Was the feed you marked as read in a folder? Etc.
Hi Daniel,
I just uninstalled (using AppZapper) and reinstalled the program. I added my sites feed which downloads the latest 50 posts. I hit “Mark all as read” waited 20 (yes I counted) seconds. Closed the program, reopend it. It said there were still 43 new posts. I hit “mark all as read”, everything looked ok. Counted, closed, reopened, still had 43 new posts.