The RSS reader Reeder, which I use every day in refining sources for TeleRead articles, has put out a couple of updates for its iPad and iPhone versions in the last few days. The iPad version is more on the nature of an incremental update, fixing bugs and improving full article view, but the iPhone/iPod Touch version adds support for using Readability to fetch the full text of articles—something which had already come to the iPad version, and which I had been missing from the iPhone version ever since getting another iPod Touch.
As with the iPad version of Readability, it fetches the complete text of the article and presents it in the same font and background as other RSS postings, rather than forcing the device to spend the extra time to fetch and render the webpage version. Since my iPod Touch is with me wherever I go, this is going to be a lot more useful for spending spare time on the go catching up with and evaluating articles for blogging here.
On a related note, Charlie Sorrel at Wired’s Gadget Lab has a look at ReadPad, another $5 RSS reader for the iPad, which shares a lot of similarities to Reeder and is just as easy to use. It sounds like a useful reader, and I’m tempted to check it out, but it doesn’t sound like it has Reeder’s Readability support and that puts Reeder way over the top for me.
