Reasons I Can’t Switch to Fever (Yet) Posted on: January 16th, 2011 by Daniel Welcome! If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve been trying to de-​centralize my online ser­vice usage lately. It’s not really a protest against any one ser­vice or another, I just don’t want to have all of my eggs in Apple’s or Google’s (or any other company’s) basket so wher­ever I can find a way to choose smaller inde­pen­dent soft­ware ven­dors for some­thing I use – cal­en­dars, email, rss, photos, etc, I’ll give it a shot. One thing I decided to check into was if I could really live with­out Google Reader.

Between the fan­tas­tic Reeder appli­ca­tion family, the Reader web­site (with Na Wong’s Pure Reader exten­sion of course) and a host of other great apps that inte­grate with Reader in one way or another (Flip­board comes to mind), this was going to be a hard sell. And hon­estly, of all of the things that creep me out about what Google knows about me, the feeds I read on a reg­u­lar basis are the lowest on the list – so it’s hard to really want to give them the boot in this regard. With that said, I thought I’d give Fever, a really neat RSS aggre­ga­tor, another shot.

If you were a reader of my Square­One blog before I shut that down, I wrote a review of the soft­ware and it’s desk­top com­po­nent is really amaz­ing. Where it dif­fers from Reader and other apps of its kind is that it ana­lyzes all of your feeds and groups arti­cles together based on rel­e­vance and fre­quency. In other words, ‘hot’ news items bubble up to the top and are grouped together, that way you spend less time skim­ming feeds and more time read­ing arti­cles that matter.

It’s not a per­fect system but I really do find myself read­ing RSS a lot less often when I’m using Fever. Some of my gripes: There’s no iPhone app (yet). This means the only way to read Fever on the go is with a web-​optimized page that works ok, but is lack­ing in the speed department. No easy ‘add to instapaper’ option for the mobile web ver­sion.

This is a bit of a deal breaker. Ashes (iPad app) is half baked and it would appear devel­op­ment has stopped Sounds like a prob­lem that could/should be fixed, eh I’ve been look­ing for real moti­va­tion to get back into Xcode land. I think this might be the thing to do it. The Fever API isn’t super robust, but it would do all of the things I’d like in a iOS Fever client (sync, send to instapa­per sup­port, open arti­cles with an inline browser) and would be a good place to learn simple xml/json pars­ing with Objec­tive C. It’s been a while since I spent any real time with the SDK but I think with some very con­crete goals I should be able to have some­thing in the store within 6 months if I stay focused.

That’s the idea at least. I’ll try to post my progress, screen­shots and what­not as I get going. This will def­i­nitely be a learn­ing expe­ri­ence and it’s not really about trying to make money, but I think it’s some­thing that’ll be fairly fun and ulti­mately it’ll be some­thing I want to use anyway.

Products cre­ated out of need by some­one who is pas­sion­ate about its qual­ity tend to make the best bits of code anyhow. If you’re a designer who would like to help with an icon or five, let me know. I’m kind of in the early phase of this whole deal, but I’m sure some­thing could be arranged if you’d like to get involved.