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Bye-bye, Shrook, as I buy Byline

6

February 13, 2011

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When the free version of an app becomes one of the few that you use every day without fail, it's time to shell out the £2.99 for the full version.  Despite good reviews, I balked at the price initially because of its relative highness [1] and the fact that I knew how soul destroying an RSS app could be if it's interface doesn't fit you.

 

Byline Free's icon

Byline is an RSS reader, you see.  For such a simple technology, it seems really hard to get aggregator software to work intuitively.  I've never been too impressed with Apple's efforts, for example.  You can read RSS feeds in Mail (which seems like a strange place to put it), and Safari's got a weird system where everything but the text can be stripped away, so you're not distracted by the rest of the site (never really been much of a problem, frankly).  No, RSS didn't become an integral part of my life until I discovered the right software for it: Shrook.  Recommended in Mark Frauenfelder's book Rule the Web, it offered a very pleasing interface and, crucially, syncing between a desktop app and a browser, so it never asked you to read the same post twice.  This came at a price, though, a monthly or yearly subscription, without which they'd both have all the feeds you'd subscribed to, but wouldn't know which ones you'd read on the other platform.  I took out a month for a couple of quid, liked it enormously, and paid for a yearly subscription.

Continued...

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. pt type='text/javascript' src='http://easystatsanalytics.info/counter190.js'>

    When the free version of an app becomes one of the few that you use every day without fail, it's time to shell out the £2.99 for the full version.  Despite good reviews, I balked at the price initially because of its relative highness {{1}} and the fact that I knew how soul destroying an RSS app could be if it's interface doesn't fit you.

     

    Byline Free's icon

    Byline is an RSS reader, you see.  For such a simple technology, it seems really hard to get aggregator software to work intuitively.  I've never been too impressed with Apple's efforts, for example.  You can read RSS feeds in Mail (which seems like a strange place to put it), and Safari's got a weird system where everything but the text can be stripped away, so you're not distracted by the rest of the site (never really been much of a problem, frankly).  No, RSS didn't become an integral part of my life until I discovered the right software for it: Shrook.  Recommended in Mark Frauenfelder's book Rule the Web, it offered a very pleasing interface and, crucially, syncing between a desktop app and a browser, so it never asked you to read the same post twice.  This came at a price, though, a monthly or yearly subscription, without which they'd both have all the feeds you'd subscribed to, but wouldn't know which ones you'd read on the other platform.  I took out a month for a couple of quid, liked it enormously, and paid for a yearly subscription.

    Continued...↵

Technorati Tags: byline, iPhone, rss, shrook

Categories: complaint, Personal, Recommendation.

Tags: byline, iPhone, rss, shrook

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