Lots of review requests show up in my inbox every single day. Some of them are from great developers who produce great apps and deserve coverage. Some of them are just from weird dudes asking for “a post on your website” about their latest Angry Birds clone.
Then there are the strange ones.
You know, those apps the developers present as a “new take on something” but that, actually, they can’t explain either. I read those emails and often ask myself “How the hell did he think of doing this?”. Most of the times I don’t write about those…things. But this one, this one deserves a quick mention.
Trackr is a RSS feed reader which lets you download files and upload them to Dropbox.
The app doesn’t support Google Reader, and the UI needs a lot of refinements. But the idea is good: you subscribe to a website, and if that website publishes files to download (say a podcast) you can immediately download it and save it to Dropbox. You can also save files in your local device storage - but come on, Dropbox is better. Say you’re on the go, Gruber links to The Talk Show latest episode: click the download icon (top right), tap on the podcast link and Trackr starts pulling the file from the internet and uploading it. Sweet, isn’t it?
What’s even better is that I found out you can download almost anything, not only files: you can download entire webpages for offline access and upload them to Dropbox. Once you’ve activated the “download mode” you can tap on anything you want and download. And of course, being a RSS app, you can share articles across you favorite social networks.
At $2.99 in the App Store, Trackr might be one of the most peculiar apps I’ve recently stumbled upon. It’s not as beautiful as Reeder, it doesn’t support Google Reader - it’s not developed by a “big name of the industry”. But it’s something new.