Posts tagged with "Mr. Reader"

A Feature from 10 Years Ago Is Back – with a Twist – in My Favorite RSS Client

Unread's new custom shortcuts.

Unread’s new custom shortcuts.

When it comes to productivity apps, especially those that have to work within the constraints of iOS and iPadOS, it’s rare these days to stumble upon a new idea that has never been tried before. With the exception of objectively new technologies such as LLMs, or unless there’s a new framework that Apple is opening up to developers, it can often feel like most ideas have been attempted before and we’re simply retreading old ground.

Let me be clear: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. I’ve been writing about iPhone and iPad apps for over a decade now, and I believe there are dozens of design patterns and features that have undeservedly fallen out of fashion. But such is life.

Today marks the return of a very MacStories-y feature in one of my longtime favorite apps, which – thanks to this new functionality – is gaining a permanent spot on my Home Screen. Namely, the RSS client Unread now lets you create custom article actions powered by the Shortcuts app.

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JavaScript Actions In Mr. Reader 3.1→

In an update released last week on the App Store, Mr. Reader has gained the ability to execute JavaScript actions based on individual scripts configurable in the app’s Settings. Developer Oliver Fürniß has documented the app’s new JavaScript integration here.

Mr. Reader already was a versatile and capable feed reader for iPad – notably, the app introduced a customizable Services menu that allowed users to set up their own sharing actions with URL schemes. The new JavaScript actions go a step beyond URL schemes as they enable Mr. Reader to store article information in a variety of new ways such as collections that can be copied to the clipboard.

I’m interested to see what Mr. Reader users will come up with to further extend the app. Mr. Reader has clearly taken the power-user approach for feed reading and management on the iPad, and the app remains a highly recommended purchase at $3.99. In the update, Mr. Reader also received native support for OneNote, Reminders, and improved search.

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Mr. Reader 2.0 Adds Support For Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever, and More

Mr. Reader 2.0

Mr. Reader 2.0

With Google Reader shutting down in less than a week, developers of RSS clients for iOS and OS X are rushing to get updates approved by Apple and let App Store customers continue using their apps with other RSS services. In the past two weeks, details have emerged on a variety of new RSS platforms that are launching on the brink of Reader’s demise, such as Feedly, Digg Reader, and AOL Reader; I’ve already covered Feed Wrangler, the service I’m currently using, and Reeder’s update with support for Feedbin. It’s not clear if one service will stand out as a “winner” in a post-Google Reader world; for now, what’s apparent is that most third-party developers are deciding to support various Google Reader alternatives rather than picking a single service (as it happened with Google Reader in the past three years). Today, my favorite Google Reader app for iPad, Mr. Reader, has been updated to support six new RSS services, with a version 2.0 that doesn’t add new sharing or reading functionalities, but that ensures the app will continue working after July 1. Read more

Reeder To Add Support For Feedly and Feed Wrangler

Soon after Google announced they would shut down their RSS platform Reader this July, Feedly confirmed they would build an API clone – codenamed Normandy – to ease the transition from Reader to Feedly for users and third-party developers. Essentially, this meant Feedly had been working on its own RSS syncing service with support for third-party clients to complement its own set of native apps.

In a blog post published today, Feedly has announced that they have been working with developer partners over the past two months to ensure the feedly API, based on the Normandy project, could launch with an ecosystem of native third-party apps. And among the apps that will support Feedly before July 1 (when Google will shut down Reader) there’s Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder, one of my favorite RSS apps for the iPhone and iPad.

We are also hearing from users that saving their feeds is not enough: One of the key features of Google Reader was that they had an ecosystem of apps – apps that people love and depend upon.

We have been working behind the curtains with the developers of Reeder,Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader as design partners for our Normandy project. Today we are excited to announce that you will be able to access your feedly from all these apps before Google Reader retires and that the access to feedly API will be free. More details soon.

I have reached out to Rizzi, who confirmed Feedly support will indeed be added to the next versions of Reeder. His client, which was updated last April on the iPhone to support Feedbin sync and local RSS feeds, will also be updated for Feedly integration. While a precise release timeframe isn’t clear yet, it’s safe to assume Feedly integration will first come to the iPhone and then to Reeder for Mac and iPad (Rizzi made Reeder for iPad and Mac free while he’s working on a major 2.0 update).

Rizzi also told me that Reeder will support Feed Wrangler, David Smith’s RSS service that launched in late April. In my review of Feed Wrangler, I noted:

In the next “few weeks”, an official API will be released to let third-party developers create Feed Wrangler clients, and I think that will be a key aspect for scaling the service’s adoption rate to accommodate different kinds of users and applications. While the platform is solid and reliable, it lacks the beautiful interface polish of Google Reader apps like Reeder, or the power-user functionality of Mr. Reader’s services menu. The official website and apps should serve as an example of what Feed Wrangler can do, but it’ll be up to third-party clients to prove Feed Wrangler’s flexibility.

Again, as with Feedly integration, Rizzi can’t provide a specific release date today. Feed Wrangler, which has become my favorite Google Reader replacement, comes with a series of unique implementations of the decade-old concept of syncing and reading feeds, and it’ll be interesting to see how Reeder will take advantage of it in its custom interface.

Today, another popular RSS app for iPad – Mr. Reader – confirmed that it will add support for Feed Wrangler (alongside Feedbin and Fever) in a future 2.0 update.

Create New Byword Notes From Mr. Reader→

Create New Byword Notes From Mr. Reader

I’m a big fan of Mr. Reader’s new services menu. Through URL schemes (documented here), it allows the app – a Google Reader client – to send selected text, URLs, or article titles to other apps. One of the custom actions posted by the developer allows you to create a new note in Byword, possibly formatted as a linked post for your blog.

The action (which you can download here) uses by Byword URL scheme to create a new note. In the note, you can have the article’s original title, some selected text, and a source link formatted as Markdown. As shown in the image above, you can modify the template with any characters you want. For instance, I added a > character before [TEXT-SELECTED] to format the selection as a quote block in Markdown.

I personally use Nebulous Notes and Poster to create articles for MacStories on the iPad, but a lot of folks like Byword. Check out the Mr. Reader action if you’ve been looking for a way to send text and links from Google Reader to Byword.

(Bonus: here’s a quick video showing the action)

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Mr. Reader And The Services Menu for iOS

A “services menu for iOS” is a chimera advanced users and developers have long been trying to hunt down. It all started with a mockup Chris Clark posted in 2010, showing how third-party iPhone apps could offer their “services” – just like OS X apps – to the user through a contextual menu. The concept became popular fairly quickly, but, eventually, Apple did nothing.

Fast forward to 2013, iOS users are still asking for better integration of third-party apps with each other. Developers have resorted to using URL schemes, a rather simple way to directly launch other apps and pass information to them – usually bits of text. App Cubby’s Launch Center Pro has become the de-facto solution to create a “Home screen of app shortcuts”, offering a series of tools (such as automatic encoding and different keyboards) to make the process of customizing URL schemes as user-friendly as possible. Launch Center Pro is, in fact, the utility behind many of my favorite iOS tricks.

Pythonista has also become a big part of my iOS automation workflow. Combining the power of Python with the possibility of launching URL schemes, I have created a series of scripts that help me get work done on iOS on a daily basis. Further leveraging Greg Pierce’s x-callback-url, I have ensured these scripts can take a set of data, send it to other apps, process it, then go back to the original app. You can read more about Pythonista in my original article, and I’ve been following updates from developers who implemented URL schemes as well with a dedicated tag on the site.

I concluded my Pythonista article saying:

I believe that, going forward, Pythonista and other similar apps will show a new kind of “scripting” and task automation built around the core strenghts of iOS. As we’ve seen, x-callback-url is a standard that leverages a part of iOS – URL schemes – to achieve simple, user-friendly and URL-based inter-app communication that can be used in a variety of ways. Looking ahead, there’s a chance rumored features such as XPC will bring more Mac-like functionalities to iOS, but developers will still find new ways to make iOS more powerful without giving up on positive aspects such as increased security and the simplicity of the app model.

Mr. Reader – a Google Reader client that I’ve covered on MacStories in the past, and my favorite RSS app – has today been updated to version 1.11, which introduces a generic solution for launching URL schemes that shows how iOS automation is a growing trend, albeit substantially different from what we’re used to see on OS X. Read more

Mr. Reader Gets A Great Update with Evernote, Send2Mac, Terminology Support

There’s no doubt Mr. Reader is becoming one of the most powerful and integrated RSS apps for the iPad. Ever since I reviewed version 1.0 back in April, the developer went back to work to implement several features that are making Mr. Reader a Google Reader client that’s not limited at fetching and marking items as read from a native interface. Rather, Mr. Reader shipped with a good selection of external services to send your favorite articles to, but version 1.1 added support to create tasks in OmniFocus and integration with third-party iOS browsers like iCab. Whereas most feed readers want to provide a good reading experience but don’t focus on letting you get those feeds out of the closed Google Reader experience, Mr. Reader aims at filling the gap between online services / apps and RSS.

Version 1.2, released yesterday and available now at $3.99 in the App Store, takes the whole concept of getting articles out of the app a step further. With Evernote, Send2Mac and Terminology support, you’ll be able to save articles as notes in your Evernote account, send webpages to your desktop browser in the background thanks to the great Send2Mac service (which already works on Lion), or get definitions of words you don’t know if Agile Tortoise’s app is installed on your iPad. Unlike Instapaper, definitions are not provided in a popover inside the application (at least on iOS 5): when you select a word and hit the Terminology button, you’ll be brought directly to Terminology with the selected word at the top of the list and a popup at the bottom saying that you opened that word from Mr. Reader.

Evernote support is really simple, and I like it: the app will create a blank note with just the title and URL section saved from Mr. Reader. As for Send2Mac, it works perfectly but it only allows you to configure one computer – I’d love to add both my MacBook Pro and iMac to Mr. Reader.

There’s a lot more in Mr. Reader 1.2 though. Tapping on an article will let you open all feeds from the original source; you can send articles to Readability, if you’re a fan of the service; a new theme, Sydney, has been added and others have been refined; the annoying modal sync window has been changed to an unobtrusive spinning indicator that doesn’t overlay the feed list. Alongside dozens of other bug fixes and improvements, Mr. Reader now remembers your preferred view for each feed automatically.

At $3.99 and with updates coming out every few weeks to make the app more stable and integrated, I’m excited to see Mr. Reader taking on Reeder as the most powerful (yet elegant) iPad RSS reader. While looking forward to iOS 5 and (perhaps) iCloud integration, you can get the app here.