Fiery Feeds adds Instapaper-like universal read-later service

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Some illustrative fire.
Some illustrative fire.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Fiery Feeds is my favorite RSS reader app on iOS. It strikes the perfect balance between power, good looks, and ease of use. For instance, you can customize the entire look of the app with themes, you can set it to share stories to your chosen apps with a single swipe, and the whole thing is navigated with swipes. Version 2.2 just showed up, and it’s a biggie. Apart from some neat UI changes, Fiery Feeds now has iCloud syncing, and its own built-in Instapaper alternative.

What is an RSS reader?

Fiery Feeds is a news reader app. You subscribe to any website (pretty much every site it compatible, thanks to RSS being built into most blog and website-hosting software), and you see all the new stories and updates from those sites in one place. You can organize sites into folder, tag them, share them, and read them in a beautiful, clean view, without malware-stuffed ads, and other crap. Imagine Twitter, only without the poison and idiotic opinions, and with the added bonus that you never miss out on a story because it dropped off your timeline.

Three-pane view

The new three-pane view.
The new three-pane view.
Photo: Cult of Mac

I’ll get to the read-later feature in a moment. First, the rest of the cool stuff in this (pretty big) update. On the iPad, there’s now a three-pane view: A feed list on the left, an article list next, and the article itself on the right. I switched it off almost right away, as I don’t need so much on screen at once, which one of the great things about Fiery Feeds — customization. If you have a 13-inch iPad, you can even use this view in portrait orientation.

Fiery Feeds accounts

Cult of Mac looks great in Fiery Feeds.
Cult of Mac looks great in Fiery Feeds.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Previously, you’d use Fiery Feeds with third-party newsreader services like Feedly, Newsblur, and others. These do the actual gathering of the news, and client apps like Fiery Feeds and Reeder sync with them. Now, you can just add news feeds direct to the app. If you use on more than one device, you can sync the un/read status of your feeds using iCloud. Also new is account and settings sync, which means you don’t have to add any accounts manually when you set things up on a new device (passwords will still need to be entered by you).

This is great for getting started, and especially good if you’re setting up a friend with RSS for the first time — there’s no need to sign them up for a separate RSS newsreader account.

Fiery Feeds Read Later

The new Read Later share extension works everywhere.
The new Read Later share extension works everywhere.
Photo: Cult of Mac

And now my favorite part: a built-in read-later service. You could already add you Instapaper account to Fiery Feeds, but now it cuts out the middleman. You can add any article to your read-later list, and then read it later. Fiery Feeds will even remember your reading progress for articles, so you can leave a long article and then resume where you left off.

The thing that makes this really great is that you can add articles to Fiery Feeds’ reading list from any other app. There’s a new share extension that allows you to save an article from any other app, just like with Instapaper.

Saved articles are available in their own section, which has a special behavior that never automatically marks an article as finished. Articles stick around forever, if you want them to. Articles are organized by the domain they came from, and you can add tags to organize them further.

One thing missing at the moment is search. You can’t search your saved articles.

Just buy it

If you’re looking for a news-reading app, then I totally recommend Fiery Feeds. I’ve been using it daily for years now, and although I sometimes try out new apps, I always go back to it. It’s free, with an optional $10-per-year subscription for premium features.

Fiery Feeds: RSS Reader

Price: Free

Download: Fiery Feeds: RSS Reader from the App Store (iOS)

 

 

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