miscellany

Loyalty in the app-verse

Warning: for those of you who don’t speak tech, cover your eyes…

I value loyalty, and I’d like to be able to think that it’s a quality I’m possessed of. When it comes to apps, however, I’m constantly challenged. With the constant drive to refine workflows, to do more with less or do less at higher quality, I’ve gone 180 on applications I’d previously been gung-ho about more often than I’d care to admit.

There was the Things debacle: I was an early adopter, it didn’t work the way I needed it to, the truth of which I only realised after trying to recommend it to countless friends and non-GTD obsessed technophobes. There’s the occasional back and forth between Instapaper and Pocket (aka Read It Later): Pocket pulled me back with the recent overhaul. Evernote vs WriteRoom, Notational Velocity and every other information manager: I’m currently using both. The list continues.

My most recent flip? Reeder. Hands down, Reeder is the most beautiful RSS app for the iPad available (IMHO, of course). But not the most functional. I’ve hopped on the Mr Reader wagon, and thus far, I’m happy.

I’ll save the in-depth technical review for some other post (if anyone’s particularly interested). Suffice to say, Mr Reader pays a lot of attention to the mobilising all that incoming reading material and doing functional things with it. Whether pushing items to a Tumblr queue, posting to Buffer or any of the other available services, Mr Reader makes it easy. And when it comes to managing incoming information that may or may not be useful, easy is good. Very good.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Reeder updates, and then, who knows? Maybe time to flip again…