Google Reader is going away on Monday. That means that Reeder, my RSS reader of choice, is going to stop working. So far, only the Reeder iPhone app has been updated. That’s useless to me because the iPhone screen is too small for me to comfortably read large amounts of text. I might be willing to use an up-to-date iPad app until the Mac version is ready but that’s not ready either.
I’ve heard good things about Feedly so, with time running out, I created an account and imported my data. The one button import worked perfectly and easily. It was literally just clicking the button and then signing into Google Reader. I haven’t set up the iPad app yet but so far I’ve been very happy with the Mac version. That’s really browser based but there’s a plugin for Safari.
In some ways having the Mac interface be browser based is an advantage. I don’t have to switch applications when I want, for example, to bookmark an article. The preview function is better than Reeder’s was and it’s easy to pop up another browser window with the article in it if you need the full browser functionality. That’s the case if you want to bookmark or clip to Evernote, for example.
The interface is simple to use and typing ? will pop up a help screen with the keyboard shortcuts. The syncing (between my two Macs) works fine so I’m confident that the iPad app will stay in sync too. That’s really my main requirement. I read RSS on my two Macs and my iPad and I need them to stay in sync.
My only concern is that the service is free—and we all know where that can lead—but my notes (that I’ve been accumulating about alternative readers) indicate that there will be a paid version as well. That’s welcome news. After the Google Reader Apocalypse, I’ve upgraded most of my free services to the paid version.
So far, I like Feedly and don’t foresee any reasons to switch. Just in case, though, I exported my subscriptions with Google Takeout. If you have a lot of saved posts, tags, and other information, you should take a look at this post from Mihai Parparita. It describes a tool that let’s you get all your Google Reader data, not just the subscriptions.