Feedly for iOS, Android Updated – Finally a Serious Mobile Google Reader Replacement
It’s been just over a month since Google announced the end of Google Reader and Feedly is clearly in the lead to dominate the market.
This news reader service has released a number of major updates in the past month, including one today that finally offers the Google Reader style reading experience that this hard-core news junky has been looking for.
This update adds some bug fixes, better support for Hebrew and Farsi, and improved support for poor internet connections, but it also brings one hugely important change that is going to please a lot of news junkies.
The iOS and android apps now have a new title view that I have been desperately wanting. Feedly is describing it as a "denser and cleaner title-only view" and compared to the previous list view or magazine style layouts it truly is dense.
You can see one example of the new view at the top of the post, and here is a larger one:
Speaking as an expert on reading, if you liked the dense info rich Google Reader layout then this is the replacement you want. This new title view is actually one step better than Google Reader. Seriously.
One problem I always had with GR was that the titles were so densely packed that it was easy to miss an important story. It’s not that I wasn’t reading the titles as I scanned them, but that the layout was so dense that it was easy to skip a line and not realize it.
This new title view on Feedly fixes that problem by added a short blurb to each title. This costs a little bit of screen real estate but it also adds a useful spacer.
Do you know what? This is something Google should have added years ago, if only they had cared to put any work into Google Reader. In my opinion this moves Feedly far ahead of the other 6 possible Google Reader alternatives.
On a related note, it is also possible to make Feedly look more like Google Reader in the browser as well, so right now all I need before I completely give up on GR is a way to translate non-English feeds.
Feedly is also coming up short in the search dept; you can search for feeds that you want to subscribe to but you cannot search the feeds that you are already following. That can be a problem for those of us that want to find stories we had read weeks ago but didn’t think to save.
Have you found a good replacement for Google Reader?
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