Hacker News Reader

Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

In this day and age, how could people use desktop reader without syncing feeds when they're on their phones? I don't get it.

NetNewsWire on Mac is pretty good looking and fast software. But it is useless without its counterpart on iPhone.

When it comes to RSS feeds, it is an either/or scenario. You either have RSS wherever and whenever you want (and it has to be synced up and up to date), or you don't.

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I agree that a multidevice, always-available solution is better for many activities, especially for news, but the downside to this requirement is that desktop apps become unimaginative, blown-up versions of the mobile apps.

I want more developers to create unapologetically desktop apps — unconstrained, customizable, with multiple and filterable views of content, able to integrate and share data with other apps.

(Yes, these are not mutually-cancelling goals. You can have a good enough iOS app and a more interesting Mac app. However, developer time is finite, features beget bugs, and only a small fraction of users collaborate with an open source project)

I agree. I only want my up-to-date data (which is feeds in this context) to be available in a bare-minimum fashion on my mobile, when I'm away from my desktop. The argument I make above is based on the fact that when it comes to RSS, your data (feeds) is either in a read state, or it is un-read. It should be up to the users to decide where and what he/she wants to read. The equal unavailability of the data/feeds on multi-platform makes it very hard to consume the feeds.

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