Review: River of News (Google Reader app for iPad)

The other day I was listening to MacBreak Weekly and during their "Picks" Leo Laporte recommended River of News, a Google Reader app for the iPad. About a year ago, I wrote that I was done with RSS readers that had to synchronize with Google Reader and was satisfied with the web interface. However, I decided to take a look at River of News. It was only $2.99, so buying it didn't break the bank.

When I first started it up, I was amazed at how well it worked. After playing with it for awhile, I started wanting to read my RSS feeds on it instead of on the desktop; now that's saying a lot! I'm not sure how it is talking to Google Reader, but it didn't seem that there was a "sync" process to mark feeds read/unread and the flagged of articles worked flawlessly. It makes reading my feeds (OK, maybe information overload) a pleasure.

The only issue I have with the app is that it's a bit slow when you scroll down and it has to retrieve a few more articles. While I realize that the trigger for fetching new articles is when the user hits the end of the page while scrolling, it would be nice if the developer changed it so that when you were done with a few articles, it would go fetch the next batch in the background so that there is no waiting.

Pros

  • Inexpensive
  • Easy to use interface
  • Integrates well with Google Reader

Cons

  • A little slow at loading new articles

Summary

If you read RSS feeds, this is currently my reader of choice. It's a no brainer to spend the $2.99 on this, even just to see how it works. Now if the developer addressed (fixed is highly subjective), the slow loading, I'd be in reader heaven.

Comments

September 3rd, 2010
Review: iDealizer Pro | Scott Gruby’s Blog

[…] Scott Gruby’s Blog Another semi-useless spot on the web… Skip to content HomeAboutContact ← Review: River of News (Google Reader app for iPad) […]

September 3rd, 2010
Dylan

Hello. I’m the developer of River of News. Thanks for the great review! I love reading comments like yours.

I hear your complaint. It actually does prefetch today but only if you aren’t scrolling. Even in a background thread the prefetching was having a noticeable impact on scrolling performance so I disabled it. But I believe I can make it better with more time to optimize and I plan to revisit this soon.

September 8th, 2010
tdaonp

Are apps becoming the bane of the browser? And with it the bane of Internet content creators who rely on eyeballs on the original story to receive revenue?

I wrote an article exploring that question: http://www.noisepollution.nl/?p=2287

Kind regards, Henk

September 8th, 2010
Scott Gruby

Content creators have to get clever with their content. For example, some RSS feeds have ads at the bottom and others just have a snippet of the story and requires the user to see the full page to get the rest (Ars Technia is one example).