For those of you who haven’t heard already, Google has announced that as part of a “spring cleaning”, they are shutting down Google Reader.
My previous solution was to use the RSS in Mail on OS X. But Apple yanked that out as of Mountain Lion (another instance of “Dammit, I was using that!”).
So now I’ve been doing a two-pronged solution of NetNewsWire parked as my local reader on my computer, which is where I keep up with authenticated feeds–and that synced in turn up to Google Reader, where I was keeping up with everything that wasn’t authenticated. That way I’ve been able to read things at work in between doing, well, work.
I tried feedHopper on my iPad, since it was the ONLY RSS app I was able to find that’d do authenticated feeds at all; all of the rest I looked at were strictly Google Reader clients. And I’ve also tried Flipboard, but honestly, the ‘magazine’ type layout doesn’t do anything for me. Yes, it’s pretty, but it’s not at all helpful in keeping track of what things I’ve read and what things I haven’t. Which is the whole point of me trying to aggregate all the things I want to follow in one or two places.
But now that Google Reader’s going away I’m going to have to rearrange things AGAIN!
What will have to happen now: find out whether NetNewsWire, my current frontrunner for RSS apps, will implement any kind of syncing solution between computer, devices, and web, maybe via iCloud. If they do that, I will happily throw them my money.
Alternately, if anybody out there wants to recommend me an app that will a) specifically handle authenticated feeds, and b) sync between computer, devices, and web, I’d LOVE to hear about it.
If you want to go hunting for a new RSS solution yourself, I’ll also point you at these links:
- Feedly has a transition plan in play
- ExtremeTech proposes 8 alternatives
- Slashdot to the rescue!
- Marketing Land proposes 12 alternatives (many of which are also in the ExtremeTech article, but)
ETA: Apparently there’s a petition to ask Google to keep Reader active. As of this ETA, it has nearly 75,000 signatures.
