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These Adobe AIR applications just seem to be taking over right now, don’t they? I don’t know about you but I’m I’m definitely falling in love with these lightweight applications. The latest one I’ve come across has been Apprise Reader. Of course, I downloaded it right away, just to test the waters & give you guys the scoop.
In their own words:
“Apprise isn’t about just reading all your news on one place; it’s also about sharing your news all in one place. With built-in AIM and Twitter support, all you have to do is click on an article to start it cascading through your social network.”
Well first I must say that there is a Greasemonkey script that takes care of sharing posts in Google Reader though, I’m not sure if there’s one for AIM yet.
It takes only about 2 minutes to download & actually load Apprise Reader; it’s very light & clean. Starting with the preferences, you can set a “feed refresh interval (in hours)” as well as the option to remove posts older than a certain amount of time (chosen by you).
Enabling AIM will allow you to share posts with your AIM buddies right from the Apprise Reader. When and if you do decide to share something, you can use a default message or write your own. Enabling Twitter allows you to post links to Twitter. Don’t worry, all your personal information is encrypted.
As far as I can see, you can add as many feeds as you’d like. As you can see below, I’ve added a feed. It shows the name of the feed & number of posts on the left/sidebar & then shows the post title, feed & date on the right.
If you plan on using Apprise with all your feeds, you might want to consider using the “import” feature. You can import or export your feeds in OPML format.
When you click on a post in a feed, it appears in a bottom window, where you’ll find two ways to view the post (as a summary or on the actual site). If you have enabled AIM and/or Twitter, a button for each services will appear (until then, they’re grayed out) at the top of the Reader, allowing you to share the item; it’s as simple as that.
One thing about Apprise is that it has a very big default size. You can make it bigger, but you can’t make it smaller. I’m not sure of the size, but it takes up about 80% of my 1280×800 laptop widescreen.
A great feature that Apprise has is that it lets you move the divider up or down, between the bottom window (which displays your posts) & top window (which shows the post titles). Besides that, my favorite feature is the fact that Apprise can load the actual website of the feed you’re view right in the bottom window. No need to open up a browser window, you can view the blog or website in Apprise.
Though, there’s a Firefox Addon that allows you to do this with Google Reader, it’s nice to have the feature already built in; no need for any added plugin.
Right now, I’m really loving Apprise. Though I’m not sure if I’m ready to switch yet (since there’s so many customizations I’ve done to my Google Reader) I’m am seriously contemplating it. I’d like to see more features integrated like the ability to share on more IM services (YIM, GTalk, etc) & sharing on social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc).
Lastly, their website does not have much info like an “about me” link or blog that I can subscribe to for updates. Though they do have a link to an Apprise Reader Google Group. So, I’m not sure what’s up with that; I guess they’ll be giving us more info soon.
So, what do you think of Apprise? Is it a feed reader that you’d consider switching over to?
Technorati Tags: apprise reader, rss feeds, feed reader, aim, twitter
