#comments

Ok. So I am addicted to my Google Reader – pretty muchas long as I’ve had my iPhone I’ve been looking for an app that would enable offline reading and would sync back to the Reader mothership for all the time spent in the subway and what not. There were none for a long time – then came Byline which I used sparingly for awhile and then a couple weeks back I did a search and found that there were now several more – so I held my breath, said what the hell and bought them all.

Let me first tell you where I’m coming from so you can see by what qualities I’ve graded these on. First of all I have just under 200 subscriptions which may be considered a lot or a little in this day and age. Unlike a lot of others I don’t j-walk through the list expanding each and every posting, I scroll through all the titles, clicking into the ones that interest me and starring ones I want to remember. This let’s me plow through a stunning number of posts in a very short period of time. Once done I mark all as read. I use the star a lot as well as share/share with note which end up on my FriendFeed page. But I don’t have folders, or rather, I do but rarely actually use them. I’m just starting to play around with tags, but I don’t think that’s going to stick.

The summary is that at this moment I’m turning to Bolt Reader every time, it’s quick and reliable and is the only one that does a fast image sync. Byline in some ways is a better client, right now with more features – but I’ve had too many instances where Byline actually lost the last sync and I’d get on the train only to find that the posts that I saw were there were replaced with an old set that I’d already read. I’ll try again in a few versions. Feeds was too slow and actually didn’t work about half the time I tried to use it, crashing before it could open the feeds. Gazette doesn’t seem to have a mode that showed all unread posts – it wants you to go into each individual feed, which made it a non-starter for me. But honestly, of all of these, I’d much prefer an offline mode to the Google Reader iPhone interface – it’s the best of them!

This thing is a little long, so the full reviews of the best of the best are after the jump.

Google Reader iPhone interface – the baseline

So, that’s sort of how I use these things. (see here for a previous review of the new reader interface) Fundamentally, of everything I’ve seen the iPhone Google Reader interface is my favourite mobile interface. It let’s you access seen and unseen posts as you wish, shows you folders, starred, noted and everything all the way down to individual feeds. It lets you star posts right from the main listing without having to open a post – I love this feature because if I’m on the go, sometimes I know I want to read a post but don’t have time at that moment so starring in the listing saves a few taps. The interface also let’s you share and note things once you’ve open it. But it doesn’t support tags.

My favourite thing about the mobile Reader is that it shows you posts in bursts of 15 and lets you mark only those 15 as read before moving on to the next set. This is fantastic for quickly jumping in, reading for as long as you happen to have time to read for and letting just those be marked read, so next time even though you may have posts newer as well as older, you won’t see duplicates. Every other app (inluding the non-mobile version of Google Reader) marks everything they know about as read, instead of just small groups, so you have to actually make it through them all or else there’ll be a lot of scrolling and trying to remember the one’s you’ve seen again. (this problem doesn’t exist for j-walkers, though) Sadly, this doesn’t work underground so I’m off to the races with the rest of these apps – but it is always the one I use when I have signal.

BoltReader

BoltReader is the one I’m turning to these days. It’s got its fair share of issues, but most of them are cosmetic. It’s amongst the plainest looking of them all – but I’m ok with that. It syncs very quickly – it first uploads any status changes (read, starred, shared) you did locally back up to the mothership and it gives you a little alert that it is doing that for x number of articles which is comforting. Then it downloads the new posts – unfortunately, for some reason it always says syncing 11 feeds – which is not comforting when you have 200ish, but I guess that’s some kinda lie because it does sync everything. Finally it goes through and starts syncing images down – conveniently after all the feeds are down so even if you don’t have enough time to grab the images – you will always have all the text of the posts.

On its first page it gives you only the options of “New Items” and any folders you’ve set up with unread items. It does not give you the ability to see individual feeds, nor starred/noted items. For me, this is no problem since I rarely ever need to see those lists while I’m on the go.

Another issue, which could just be some config I’m not tweaking properly is that while the order of the posts comes in correctly, for some reason it shows them as being like -2 hours, -1 hour, etc… there looks to be some kind of timezone issue. Again, it doesn’t really bother me since they’re in the right order. A final random issue is that in the title, there’s always a “in (null)”, bit that seems to be because they aren’t in a folder or a category. Another cosmetic problem that doesn’t affect functionality, although all of them added together may not give the best impression.

The controls are good – once in a post you can star and share a post (although you can not share with note, sadly). You can also do the equivalent of j-walk through all the posts with the up and down arrows – which bring you to the next post immediately instead of having to go back to the list view. I don’t really do this, but I know this will appeal to some. And there’s the option to open the original link in Safari – however this will take you out of BoltReader instead of just opening a webkit window within the app itself. Most of my apps are full feed so I don’t use this much, also since the whole reason that I’m using it in the first place is that I typically don’t have any signal it’s not even an option.

I like this app because it at least does the basics of what I’m looking for and it does them quickly and reliably.

Byline

This was the first app I bought. It’s also the most polished (although, honestly, I could do without that woodgrain background) and most expensive. It begins a lot like BoltReader does (just a hell of a lot prettier) with a list of your folders with unread stuff in them as well as an option to view all new items. More awesomely, it also provides an option to see all your old starred items as well as your old noted items – which is sometimes nice to have.

Clicking into one of those brings you to a list of the posts it has – again similar to BoltReader. It still doesn’t allow you to star in the list mode, but oh well. Once you’re viewing a post it shows you everything you expect and allows you to j-walk with arrows, share, star and importantly it also allows you to share with note, which is fantastic.

One of Byline’s really interesting features is its “Archiving” system – you can set it to archive your unread posts in which case it actually goes out and downloads the original page so you can view it offline – this is pretty useful if you have a lot of partial feeds. Of course this happens after it syncs down the posts so if you don’t have enough time you don’t lose posts, you just won’t be able to see the archive version. What I dislike, though, is that it does this archiving instead of pulling down the images in the posts, which obviously would happen much faster – so for most of what I read, I’d prefer to see an image in the post than have the option of seeing the original web page. YMMV.

However the main reason I’ve stopped using Byline is that I found it to be intensely flaky. I know other people like it so it may just be me, but I’ve had several times where I started the sync in my apartment. Checked it as I was going out and seen a lot of new posts there. Walked down to the train, sat down and happily pulled out the iPhone for some reading only to find that it had somehow reverted to some old set of posts from days ago that I’d already gone through. Several times. And the reverse has been true also, coming out from one of the times where I successfully got a new set of posts it failed to sync the changes back to the mothership.

So, for the lack of image syncing and even more so the lack of reliability – I keep skipping over Byline these days.

Feeds

Feeds is an app with potential. But not a lot of actual goodness. It shows you a complete listing of all your folders as well as all your feeds, which is pretty nice. And it gives you a way to view all your starred items as well as shared and unread. I believe it also is the only one that allows for tagging as well as subscribing and unsubscribing from feeds. Unfortunately, I’ve found that it takes a metric eternity to actually sync. I’m not sure why, but it takes significantly longer to pull down the feeds than the others. Unfortunately, it also takes forever to actually get to list view. So you click on “All Items” and then wait, without any sort of notification that something is happening and a little bit later the list slides in (after I’ve typically frantically tapped the screen the whole time).

Everything feels a little sluggish in the app. And other than the full listing of feeds it doesn’t provide any compelling functionality over what BoltReader or Bylines does. It doesn’t seem to archive images or archive that whole web page. And going on the reliability thing, in the little bit of usage I’ve given it, I had it crash on my several times already. Worse, it would take a long time to crash sometimes, freezing on a Feeds screen or switching to a black screen for awhile before finally making it back to the iPhone launcher. So, after a bit, once I made sure I saw the general functionality I stopped checking this app out.

TUAW really liked it, though. It is also odd that they had the exact opposite experience than me of responsiveness. It’s possible that they were just talking about this while sync’ing which isn’t an issue for me because I sync without needing to use it and use it only when I’m without signal.

Gazette

Gazette for me was a non-starter. It differs in a bunch of ways from the others, the main screen showed, instead of folders, a listing of all your individual feeds with unread posts in them. Across the bottom was some nav to get to your shared, starred and noted posts – but, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to simply see all your unread feed items in a single list. It seemed to want to make you go back and forth into each individual feed. Which is not at all the way I use the app.

On the bright side, it was the only app to allow starring from it’s list view, which I wish the others would adopt. But that’s kind of the only interesting functionality it brings to the table, beyond the basics. Without the ability to get a listing of all the unread posts, it simply wasn’t a contender for my time.

Conclusion

So to me, the two to watch are easily BoltReader ($1.99) and Byline ($4.99). Although neither of them has an interface that I prefer over the mobile GReader, they both are excellent offline versions. If Byline comes out with another upgrade that’s more stable for me, I might consider switching to it – but I do really like that Bolt syncs up the pictures very quickly, I think for me that’s more valuable than the longer, fuller (never completed) archival sync that Bylines offers. But especially if you happen to have a lot of partial feeds in your list that balance may shift to Bylines favor. Feeds ($2.99) didn’t really offer much interesting to me and seemed slow and flaky to me. Gazette ($1.99) didn’t offer my baseline need of a straight listing of all unread posts, so I didn’t spend much time with it at all – although if you are a light user with only a few feeds this may work out for you.

Anyhow, have I missed any? Which are you using?

Bylines maintains a Google Group where the developer is reasonably active.

Feeds has an active developers blog, which is good.

Unfortunately, BoltReader doesn’t seem to have any public communication with the developer. I hope it is still being actively developed. Gazette doesn’t either.