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ARRESSESS Has a Pretty Logo, a Clever Name, But Not Much in the Way of Features

logo[2]Rarely is it okay to recommend in the first sentence of a review that a service be avoided, but ARRESSESS is one of the exceptions.

ARRESSESS is an ad-supported  browser-only news reader that sets a new low for minimal features. From what I can tell it has 3 features of note: it can follow RSS feeds, display the contents of a post, and you can import an OPML file.

Before I continue, please let me draw your attention to the fact that I did not indicate that this news reader can do any of those things well.

To start, let me show you what ARRESSESS looks like. As you can see from the following screenshot, the developer is in love with the color blue:arressess 1

While you can see a lot of blue, let me point out what you cannot see. There’s no post count for each feed, and that means there’s no way to tell how many posts you might have to read. There’s also no sorting options, search, or viewing options.

One other feature that ARRESSESS is missing are separate panels for the list of feeds and the list of posts; both lists are manipulated by the scroll bar on the right. If you want to scroll down to the bottom of a post,  your list of feeds will scroll down at the same time. This gets annoying, fast.

And this service doesn’t even offer a decent reading mode. As I can tell from the following screenshot, ARRESSESS doesn’t properly display the formatting in the post. The image at the top of the post should be in the upper right, with text wrapped around it:

arressess 2

In its defense, ARRESSESS is more readable than I expected and it does also support saved posts and tags, but it does not appear to be able to support folders nor does it have any sharing options. Also, the option to click a link and read a post on its original website is hidden at the end of the post and not at the top. That’s going to make it difficult to visit a site and join in on a discussion.

In short, this news reader service is so far from what your favorite news junkie is looking for in a Google Reader alternative that I am sorely tempted to create a new category for this blog.

In really short: AVOID

ARRESSESS

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Comments


David Haywood Young July 22, 2013 um 1:39 pm

FWIW, I often noticed GR didn’t honor stuff like "float:right;" when displaying images either. Never investigated to figure out why/how, though.

Nate Hoffelder July 22, 2013 um 2:21 pm

There was probably nothing for GR to ignore. I know for a fact that I had to install a plugin to make sure that the CSS is completely functional in the RSS feeds.


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