Because I write about technology, people tend to ask me for tech advice. So ever since Google’s heartbreaking announcement that it was closing down Google Reader—and the newsfeed syncing APIs that went along with—folks have asked me what my news reading plan is post Reader’s demise.
The Google Reader is still in beta, but it’s got some slick features. This screencast runs through the basic features. The interface is a little offbeat, but so is Gmail – right? Gruml allows you to view and manage your feed subscriptions of your Google Reader account on Mac OS X. Read your newsfeeds, manage them in folders, tag them, and much more – all in sync with your Google Reader account. Best Free Google Reader Alternatives For Web, Windows & Mac Google Reader will be gone soon and the faster you start looking for ways to move on, the better. It isn’t going to be easy though; scores of developers have created apps or services that integrate and sync with Google Reader.
I love RSS; I’ve used NetNewsWire since its launch, and I use Reeder for iPad and iPhone. All three apps stay in sync via Google Reader’s API, and they’ve worked together in beautiful harmony for years. And now Google’s ruining everything by killing a beloved (though likely unprofitable) service. So when people ask me what my plan is for RSS after Google, my answer is simple: denial, denial, denial.
Google Reader shuts down July 1. A million newsreaders will cry out, no longer able to sync their feeds across multiple devices. Those who relied on Google Reader’s Web interface will similarly find themselves stuck up the news creek without a reader. Denial’s gotten me this far, but it’s time to move on.
There are options. I don’t love any of them, yet. But perhaps I can learn to.
Export business
Many services can import your Google Reader subscriptions. But listen—and this is important—the time to export your Google Reader subscriptions is now. Don’t wait. If you haven’t exported them yet, do so before July 1 rolls around. If you use an app like NetNewsWire, you can use its Export OPML options. Otherwise, head over to Google Takeout, and re-enter your password if prompted. Click the Choose Services tab, and then find Reader in the alphabetical list. Then click Create Archive, wait a minute or three, and click Download to grab the completed archive.
There are several companies aiming to replace Google Reader both as Web services and as backend APIs for third-party apps to connect to. Some of the companies are huge—we’ll get to them in a bit. In some ways, though, I’m more intrigued by the little guys entering the space. That may be because Google, one of the biggest big guys, just left me high and dry. So let’s start smaller.
Young upstarts
All Google Reader subscription data (eg. Lists of people that you follow, items you have starred, notes you have created, etc.) will be systematically deleted from Google servers. As a new kid in the Mac territory, one of the first thing I looked into App store was Google Reader clients for Mac.As a part of a daily routine, my day starts with reading popular blogs via feed reader apps. Although, Google reader has established itself as a de facto standard there is no harm trying other Mac app.
As a new kid in the Mac territory, one of the first thing I looked into App store was Google Reader clients for Mac.As a part of a daily routine, my day starts with reading popular blogs via feed reader apps. After July 1, 2013, Google Reader is no more. Lex Friedman tried many alternatives to figure out the best way to satisfy his news reading desire with his Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Feedly, FeedHQ, Feedbin, Feed Wrangler, Fever, and BazQux Reader are all smaller companies looking to usurp Google Reader’s old place in our hearts and software. (BazQux clearly didn’t get the “start name with F” memo.)
Different apps work with different services. Reeder for iPhone (not the iPad version) currently works with Feedbin and Fever. Mr. Reader supports every service mentioned above on the iPad. As Google Reader’s demise gets closer, expect more apps to announce support for new services.
Feedly is free. To me, that’s a knock against it. If Google—Google!—couldn’t figure out a way to monetize this kind of service, I’m not sure anyone can. It doesn’t help that I’m no fan of Feedly’s interface on the Web: I basically want something that looks like NetNewsWire, and Feedly isn’t it. To its credit, the service does support a slew of keyboard shortcuts, handles folders well, and uses a clean layout—just one that doesn’t work for me. Besides the aforementioned Mr. Reader, you can use the Newsify app with Feedly; that offers a pleasant enough browsing experience on iOS, but leaves you without a great reading solution on your Mac.
Mac drive reader. Automount HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software mounts supported volumes automatically at startup, so you don’t need to bother about it each time you restart the operating system or power your computer on. However, this feature can be disabled at any moment in the program interface. Internationalization HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software supports all alphabets supported by your operating systems, including those that use non-Roman and non-Latin characters, so you will never face a problem of not getting access to file names on volumes mounted in non-native OS.
FeedHQ, on the other hand, charges money—$12 per year. That semblance of a business model goes in the pro column. But the open-source service’s plain-Jane interface would disappoint even a hardcore Linux-lover. There’s decent, omnipresent keyboard control, but no current folder support, mangled timestamps, and other problems. While it ostensibly works, it’s hard to recommend.
Feedbin charges, too; it costs $2 per month, or $20 per year. It’s the first Web service I tried that I felt I could make work. Your folders become tags in Feedbin’s parlance, and there are plenty of settings to tweak how the Web app organizes and sorts your feeds. The keyboard shortcuts are plentiful, and include excellent arrow key support, which warms my heart. There’s built-in Readability integration, so if a site’s RSS feed doesn’t include the complete article, you can click a button to load the rest of the story in many cases. Keyboard shortcuts let you open the current story in another tab, including an option (Shift-V) to open that tab in the background. Feedbin isn’t a desktop client, but it’s working hard to feel awfully close. I like that. Sometimes, though, it can feel a little slow on the Web: Marking as read takes a couple of extra beats; the article preview pane can’t keep up as you’re navigating through your feed source list. But Feedbin is certainly a service that gives me hope for our Google Readerless future.
Feed Wrangler costs $19 per year, and seemed promising at first. That rate includes free access to apps that the company offers for iOS, and an upcoming app the service says it will offer for the Mac. But I had trouble with the service. There was no confirmation when I paid the $19 subscription fee, and I never received a receipt. The service choked repeatedly on importing my feeds, and doesn’t seem to offer a way to view all of my feeds in a single list—though that may be because it refuses to import them. It doesn’t seem to handle folders. And the Web interface, like FeedHQ’s, feels sorely lacking.
Fever costs $30 and is yours to own forever—but you need to host it yourself. It’s a PHP- and MySQL-based Web engine for managing RSS feeds. It scores bonus points for its novel approach: The software aims to distinguish between “essential” and “supplemental” feeds, and tries to promote the most topical (in other words, “hottest”—get it?) stories to you first. I bought Fever back in March, when Google announced it was killing Reader, and I tried to get into it, but it’s not quite for me. While Fever does well with folders, it doesn’t do great with individual feeds kept outside of folders—such feeds don’t appear in Fever’s sidebar, though you can find their content in Fever’s Hot and Kindling sections.
That said, if you have the technical smarts to get the service installed, it’s not a bad option: The three-paneled Web interface is highly usable; the keyboard support is good; Fever will continue to work for a good long time; and third-party apps can (if they so choose) connect to it. I appreciate that I have it in my back pocket should everything else fail.
BazQux Reader looks a lot like Google Reader on the Web. And it works pretty well, with a variety of customizable views. The service costs either $9, $19, or $29 per year; you choose which price you want to pay. The keyboard support is okay, but not great; there’s no arrow key option. Overall, BazQux is okay, if unpronounceable, but its faithfulness to Google Reader’s interface is misspent on me: I was never a fan of Google Reader on the Web. If you were, though, BazQux is worth a close look.
There are other smaller services to explore, too. NewsBlur has its proponents, but I found its Web UI just didn’t work for me at all.
Big guys
Google taketh away, and now Digg and AOL are giveth-ing us readers of their own. The nascent Digg Reader isn’t bad, but its newness shines through. It uses Google Reader-style keyboard shortcuts, has no arrow key support, can’t open links in the background, and has some other quirks. Digg Reader also just released a companion iOS app. The iOS app shows even more promise than the Web app, and is a pleasure to use.
If you liked Google Reader on the Web, there’s a lot to like with Digg Reader. Despite the fact that it’s in its infancy and feels a little slow, it works, it’s usable, and Digg clearly knows what it’s doing. Digg is providing a healthy dose of optimism, and if third-parties start integrating with the service à la Google Reader, things could get very interesting.
AOL Reader actually feels a bit more polished than Digg’s take today. You can toggle across a variety of views: List, Card, Full, and Pane, the last of which is exceedingly NetNewsWire-esque. There are no iOS apps involved yet, but AOL Reader works acceptably—with occasionally too-small tapping targets—in Safari on those devices. Keyboard navigation is again Google Reader-ish, with a sad lack of arrow key control. If there’s a way to move from articles back to the source list using the keyboard, I haven’t found it.
• Easily create a table of contents page and Kindle Interactive TOC for your eBook. Requirements amazon reader for mac. • Select from a variety of themes and styles to customize the look and feel of your eBook. • Preview how your eBook looks before publishing. • Insert and place high quality images in your eBook. With Kindle Create: • No need to worry about where your book is being read: Kindle Create takes care of typesetting your eBook so that it works well on all Kindle devices and applications, including tablets, phones, and E-readers.
Still, while it’s lovely that big companies like AOL and Digg are interested in filling the RSS void, remember my concerns from the outset: They’re offering these new services for free, just like Google did. You don’t want to get hooked on either service and have it follow Google Reader all the way into the Internet graveyard.
Whether AOL or Digg Reader will prove viable in the long-term depends on a lot of factors. Digg’s involvement probably makes a little more sense than AOL’s; the analytics the company can gather (and potentially monetize) fit right in with the data it can gather from Instapaper and the main Digg website, all of which fall under the same parent company. But really, for either service to prove a hit, it will need to grow quickly, become a popular syncing option, and work reliably. None of those things is assured.
To its credit, Digg says it plans to start charging for some additional features, in a freemium model. Digg hasn’t said yet what it will charge for, beyond stressing that the currently available feature set will remain free.
So what to do
Until Wednesday, my friend and colleague Dan Frakes had a monstrous Frankenstein-level plan, involving using NetNewsWire—sans sync—on his Mac, and Reeder for iOS on both his iPhone and iPad, with Feedbin as the backend. (Neither the iPad nor Mac versions of Reeder have been updated to support Feedbin. And, personally, the Mac version of Reeder isn’t for me; I cling to NetNewsWire’s tabs.)
On Wednesday, a significant update to Mr. Reader added support for many services, so now Dan can run a native iPad app to sync with Feedbin and stick with Reeder on his iPhone. He still plans to use NetNewsWire without sync on his Mac, but that seems less than ideal to me.
So I’m going to follow partway in his footsteps. Feedbin has become my favorite option behind the scenes, and today—with a heavy heart—I removed NetNewsWire from my Dock and my Login Items. In its place is a Fluid app pointing to Feedbin, complete with an unread items count badge. My plan is to rely on the Fluid app until someone makes a great Mac app with a Feedbin backend. And like Dan, I’ll use Reeder on the iPhone, and Mr. Reader on the iPad, all of which will remain in sync thanks to Feedbin.
I’ll miss Google Reader’s backend, and I’ll miss NetNewsWire. But at least I won’t miss the news.
Google Play Book Reader For Mac
May 21,2012 17:34 pm / Posted by Hall Paular to eBooks Topics
Follow @HallPaular
Have discovered many interesting or useful articles in Google Reader and we do hope you could save them as PDF file in your local hard disk drive? This is the common situation in everyday life. People prefer to collect what they are keen on. If you wish to save a Reader feed item as a PDF, email a full blog post to somebody when you only see a partial item, or work smartly with social services, Amit Agarwal has your hook-up. In this article you will get the best way to save and convert Google Reader articles to PDF on Mac.
As we all know the Google Reader is a location that gathers your preferred blogs and sites. Every single day, Google Reader monitors the feed you've subscribed for update. Which means piles of newest articles, newsletters, news are update in your Google Reader. And the PDF is regarded as the traditionally used e-book format. It may be opened in PC, Mac, tablet and portable devices, so it's simple for you to mange PDF files on your devices and share PDF files with others, without considering whether or not they could open the PDF or not.
How to Save Google Reader articles as PDF files on Mac?
Pdf Readers For Mac
Step 1: Sign in your Google Reader and click on the 'Reader settings' button on the upper right of the page and select 'Reader settings' from the drop-down list. On the settings page, go through the 'Send-to' tab. Click on the 'create a custom link' at the end from the page.
Step 2: Then from the pop-up box, fill in the Name, URL, Icon URL info.
Step 3: Go back to the interface of Google Reader. Open articles in Google Reader and you will probably see tool bar at the end. Click on 'Send to', as well as in the drop-down list, choose 'Save as PDF'. Then the page could appears, detecting and converting the Google Reader content to PDF on Mac OS X.
Pretty easy, don't you think so? Now once you encounter a helpful article, click on the 'send to> save as PDF' to get it changed to PDF and get it offline.
As soon as you saved these content articles as PDF files with your Mac local drive, you will need to manage PDF files or Convert PDF to DOC on Mac. This is a Free Online PDF to Word for Mac. Save it for future use.
Google Reader For Windows
Read More Tips: