iPad App of the Week – Reeder

So what’s so great about Reeder for iPad?  Well all of the wonderful things that could be said about Reeder for iPhone can be said for the iPad version, it’s sleek, intuitive and extremely user friendly.  Reeder syncs with your Google Reader account and social networks.  After entering your login info,  Reeder will automatically sync all of your folders, starred items and unread feeds.  When you fire up the app you are presented with “stacks” of your feeds, you have the option to create stacks based on your individual feeds or folders.  This depends on how you have your feeds organized in Google Reader initially but you can change the view from within Reeder as well.  For example, if you have all of your feeds organized in folders the stacks you will see in Reeder will represent each of your folders.  Each stack indicates the number of unread items they contain.  Simply tap on the stack of feeds you’d like to read and you are presented with a list of the feed items.  One of my favorite features of Reeder is the ability to pinch and zoom to expand a stack of feeds or collapse them.  Just pinch your fingers and move them apart (as if zooming on a webpage or picture) and that stack will expand to show each of your feeds within that stack.

Reeder’s user interface is clean and easy to navigate, making reading your unread articles more pleasurable. The developers created Reeder with the iPad in mind, utilizing it’s space and speed.  One of the features that add to the user-friendly status is the slim navigation bar on the right of the screen.  When you’re viewing the app in portrait mode all you have to do is tap an up or down arrow to scroll through your articles. If you’re reading in portrait mode you will be presented with a list of articles, tap on the articles to read them in full screen mode, when reading your articles you can tap on the titles to view the web version in the app.  When reading in landscape mode you get a list of your unread articles with a preview to the right of it.  In both landscape and portrait modes, when you’re viewing your list of articles you can easily mark them as read/unread and starred with the swipe of a finger.

But what good is a feed reader app if there’s no way to share the articles you’re reading?  With Reeder, sharing an article is a snap. There is a convenient “share” arrow at the top of each article, tap on it and you’re presented with a list of methods of sharing the article.  The number of services you can send the article to puts Reeder above the rest of the other reader apps available.  You can share the article to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Pinboard, Instapaper, Google Mobilizer, Instapaper Mobilizer, you can add it to your Read it Later list, send it to Safari to view, you can copy the link, you can email the link, and last but certainly not least, you can send the entire article via email (for those who may not want all those options you can customize your “share” menu through the apps settings). One of my personal favorite features comes when sharing an article via Twitter.  You are presented with a window to type your tweet with buttons to automatically enter the title of the article and the link.