It is the holidays and with holidays comes family. One of the questions I get asked every year is, “what is your major?” Another question, when they hear i work with “computers” is how I keep up with technology. It appears to them that this is something that I am actively doing, but really it is more passive at this point. Used to I would watch TechTV, but now I subscribe to RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a file generated by a website that contains the most recent posts. There are many ways to subscribe to an RSS feed but there is only one method that lets you keep up with that articles you have seen and which ones you have not seen amongst all your devices.

Reeder for iPhone, iPad, and Mac is a beautifully designed application that connects to your Google Reader account for subscribing to RSS feeds and keeping up with them anywhere you are. Reeder took some natural touch gestures and made them work so well for reading RSS articles that I would consider them standard ways to interact with an interface. When you are looking at a list of headlines you can swipe to the left to mark at article as read, swipe to the right to star the article to read later. Tapping on an article in list view will bring the full article up to read where you can then pull down, while at the top of the article or bottom of the article, to go to the next and previous articles in the current list. If the article does not show the full post you can tap on the couch icon and it will attempt to show you the rest of the post without having to go to the source’s website. Alternatively you can send any article or link in the article to Instapaper.

I subscribe to 103 different RSS feeds ranging from blogs, technology news sites, webcomics, and social networking sites. I have Pinboard, a bookmarking site, set up to give me an RSS feed of any website I bookmarked with the tag “later” so that I know to check it out later. I have a RSS feed from YouTube and Vimeo set up so I can see what videos I have marked to watch later and what videos my friends are posting. I rarely keep up with Flickr, so I have a feed of what new photos my friends on Flickr are posting. With Reeder, all of these updates are visible across my iPhone, iPad, and my Mac. 103 feeds may sound like a lot but they do not all update everyday, and even if they did it would not take long to skim through all of the things that did not fully interest me.

More About Reeder

• Reeder’s Website
• Google Reader

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