One reader to view them all
Recently I have started to frequent many online services to get my daily (hourly?) dose of technology trends and opinions. My flow is to have a standalone monitor for this data. I have my browser opened on it and load these services on separate tabs and monitor them on some random frequency. I also have ReadKit opened in another window, monitoring the RSS feeds that I follow.
As I settle into this routine on a daily basis, I keep wondering: Is there a solution that would allow me to accumulate all these feeds into one single pane of glass, giving a way to seamlessly browse them and engage with them. It could then be a feed inbox.
In this regard, I came across two different approaches to the problem of feed aggregation (perhaps there are more in the works)
- Project Tapestry: An extensible iOS app (from the wonderful folks at The Iconfactory who gave us Twitterific) that attempts to “weave” all your feed data into one view, sorted chronologically. Interacting with the feed data, passes the control onto the app that is responsible for the data (like a Mastodon client or an RSS reader)1. So this will give you an inbox view for the data, but you continue to use your existing app for things more complicated than viewing. An interesting idea and I added myself as a backer for the project. My main wish is that they cross their stretch goal, so that they can develop a native macOS app, which is where I predominantly consume information.
- Unnamed App from developer of Reeder: Silvio Rizzi (the developer behind Reeder app) posted on Mastodon, about a new app he is currently working on from ground up. It too promises a single view for all the feeds. But what I found interesting about this app is that it allows you to follow YouTube and Podcasts too. If there is some way to intelligently get the transcript for the YouTube and Podcasts one follows in the app, that will be an awesome feature.
Definitely certain that there are more projects like these, with their unique take. With the growing number of services that one needs to follow to stay up-to-date, I can only imagine this problem exacerbating and we need the dev community to come up with more intelligent solutions in handling them.
That said, I will continue with my journey of experimenting with various possible solutions. If and when I do land on something that works for me, I will write about it.
- From the project description on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iconfactory/project-tapestry/description