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Thoughts on Reeder for Mac

Reeder for Mac draft 1 was released last night, and I’ve been testing it out. You can download it here. You can read more about it here. The UI is beautiful and interesting, and Reeder shows a lot of promise. As a long-time NetNewsWire user/fan I have to say this is the first Mac RSS client that has me considering switching in years. That said there are some annoyances with the UI I thought I’d write up in the hope it might spark a conversation about Reeder’s usability (particularly its keyboard based navigation) and could inform its talented developer, Silvio Rizzi. Since this is one of the first applications I can think of that has moved from iOS to OS X, its definitely interesting to see how the developer considers keyboard and mouse based interaction. There are elements in Reeder that feel like they ought to be touched (not clicked) and many (seemingly) obvious keyboard-based navigation actions that (to my mind) are missing. 

All that said, I’m very excited about Reeder and hope it sparks some renewed competition among desktop RSS clients. While much has been written about RSS clients being dead or moved to the browser, I (for one) am a huge fan of having an application that does one thing well: aggregate and read the news.

Here’s some of what seems off/missing to me:

• Love the way reading an article hides the feed list, but I wish there was a keyboard-based way to navigate back to the feed list and out of the article (the escape key sounds right).

• Article content should (reasonably) reflow to stay visible when a window/column is too small. Currently you have to use the mouse to resize the window. 
• I wish some of the great toolbar items could have keyboard shortcuts. Instapaper Mobilizer, Instapaper, opening an article in the browser are all key.
• Wish you could send an article to the browser in the background.
• I’m not sure the logic/reasoning behind having some items in the toolbar at the top of the window and some (the refresh button, the mark as read button) at the button.
• Better overall keyboard navigation. Left-Right Arrow keys (and the tab key) should move focus between feed list, feed items, and article views. It would also be nice if the focused view was hightlighted in some way.
• A proper “River of News” view, combining a list of feed items and all/a large chunk of the feed’s article into one column.