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Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether. Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.
I’ve been waiting for Fever for a while now as I’m very much still in a RSS reader wilderness, and Bloglines is definitely getting worse not better. Sadly though Fever doesn’t quite look like what I’m after, although it does look beautiful – I’m not too interested in the ‘Fever’ Digg-style personal recommendation thing, and the rest of the reading experience looks like it’s not quite what I’m looking for (see the link above for my rather particular feature set I’m after).
However, I’m not 100% sure that it’s not what I’m after but I can’t tell as there’s no live demo, and there’s no way I’m going to put down $30 without having a go first. I have absolutely no problem with adopting a desktop-app style model (pay upfront and install yourself) for web software but a key part of that is being able to try it first. Can anyone who’s bought Fever tell me whether it meets the list of criteria here?
Seriously considering writing my own one at this point, but that’s probably more hassle then it’s worth…
Comments
It must be web based
- Yep!
It must have a simple two pane view – feeds on the left, the new items from that feed on the left – and that’s the full content from those items, in reverse chronological order (newest first).
- Yep!
Also, there shouldn’t be any paging (more unnecessary clicks) – NewsGator makes this mistake.
- Yep!
When you click a feed from the left pane, it must mark all the new items in that feed read
- Nope. It marks items as read as you read them, but it is just a matter of pressing ‘a’.
I don’t have time to click a ‘Mark Read’ button, and I may well scroll too quickly past items for a javascript-based auto-mark-as-read function to work correctly.
- I scan feeds pretty fast using space bar, and it marks them properly.
It must have a way of viewing all unread items, that groups by feed – this is one of the things Google Reader messes up, as they mix all the feeds together in the unread view which makes it a lot harder to skim as you loose the context.
- Same here I’m afraid. Unread feeds aren’t grouped, the only sort order is old or new first.
It must be quick
- It’s almost on a par with Google Reader for speed -very close
I think the last 2 might be the sticking points for you
Thanks Jon!
I kind of expected as much – those last 2 points are seemingly pretty specific.
Hmmmmmm. It looks so nice but…
Damn my specific-feature-itis.