TechFriday: Simple Savysoda RSS News Reader App is best
Posted By RichC on December 19, 2014
Most media saturated consumers are frustrated using the various apps from big-name news sources for scanning, skimming and reading 100s of news articles each day. Some individual apps are pretty good, others are a real pain … particularly the newer “in your face – ad heavy” versions. The gripes are that each app is different and most tend to be sluggish and filled with self-launching video and pop-advertising.
Enter the old-school RSS reader, something I used regularly 7 years ago on the notebook computer and looking for something similar on the iPad (I do miss the browser add-on Sage sidebar reader). Newspaper and magazine reading is now pretty much all digital and scanning individual sites not realistic … so a good RSS reader is important in order to quickly sift through content.
Early RSS apps for iOS and my iPad were never able to satisfy completely … although they excited me with their cool page flipping interfaces (Flipboard, Newsify, etc). 
I would jump between one of these snazzy apps and the browser, or jump to source specific apps – WSJ, CNN, FoxNews, USAToday, etc. Very few were quick and easy and news reading became cumbersome particularly as the popularity of Twitter to announces stories grew. It was easier to follow the up-to-the-minute headlines from story creators or socially connected “watchers” and then click the links (and it still is).
BUT I think there is still a need for something that scans headlines from a variety of RSS feeds and pops up a preview or the entire article/post/content. Australian app maker SavySoda.com has a reader called News or Newsrific (they are very similar) which I’m using (each for a different set of feeds). They are not perfect, but collect feeds from many of the sources that I use to look at individually and then displays most articles on the same page … free is ok too. One on the hidden benefits is that I can gain back some storage space on my iPad … who really needs all those bloated brand media apps?
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