I’ve been trying to find just the right RSS feed reader. I’m pretty low maintenace. I just want to put feed URLs in and get posts from my favorite sites out. If the app looks good and doesn’t take up too much space, that’s even better.
That’s why I was so excited to try out Favoriteer. It’s a slimmed down feed reader, and it looks to have just the features I want with none of the extra cruft that just gets in my way. Can Favoriteer stand up against all the other feed readers on the market?
It Might Be A New Favorite
Click the Favoriteer menu bar or Dock icon to open the Favoriteer window. It’s going to be pretty boring to start out — just a bunch of updates from the developer. You need to get your RSS feeds into Favoriteer, right? Click the RSS icon at the bottom left of the window to open the subscriptions settings. There are a lot of default feeds already set up, and you only need to click them to subscribe. Lots of them are great, and they’re sorted out by subject, so you can look for topics that interest you.
Favoriteer presents each post or article in a really clean interface.
That still doesn’t solve the problem of getting the feeds you read daily into Favoriteer. You’ll do that by pasting the feed URL into the address bar at the top and clicking the plus sign. Full disclosure, when I first downloaded Favoriteer, I couldn’t get it to add any of my feeds, which you can imagine was sort of a bummer in a feed reader. With their most recent update, thought, the problem has been solved and I haven’t had any more issues. Find all of the feeds you’ve added by clicking the drop-down and selecting #My Favorites.
When you add a new feed, it can take awhile for it to show up in the Favoriteer window. Speed the process along by clicking the Reload icon. Quickly scroll to the top and check out your newest posts with the up arrow icon. The windows icon in the bottom right will automatically resize the Favoriteer window to the default.
Subscribe to default feeds or add your favorite RSS feeds to Favoriteer.
Favoriteer is great looking, if you want a really clean way to read your RSS feeds. It’s also super easy to share stuff with your friends. There are links for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even LinkedIn sharing, but rather than use OS X’s built in Twitter and Facebook integration, all of these links direct you to the social network websites. It’s still neat to be able to share right from Favoriteer, though. Clicking the email icon, however, opens Mail.app, and that’s not the mail application I use. If I want to mail an article, I have to go about it in another way.
Adjust how Favoriteer opens and syncs.
Pros and Cons
Favoriteer will display an entire article if that’s how the individual feed works, and while I usually prefer to read the whole article in my reader, it’s nice to get a preview snippet before I commit to loading the whole thing. If I’m not interested, I have to scroll through the whole article to get to the next article. Any feeds that don’t display an entire post will have a clickable link that loads the article at the original site in your browser.
All of your feeds are sort of mixed together, and there are pros and cons to that, too. Everything is in there chronologically, so you can read all of the newest stuff first. Users up to date on all of their feeds won’t have a problem, but if you’d like to just read a single feed or feeds about a certain topic, you’re out of luck. Your only option is to turn off all of your other feeds temporarily. It’s not a hardship to do that, but if you like to read each feed one at a time, Favoriteer isn’t going to make it easy.
Share what you read or open your browser to read more.
An oddity is Favoriteer is that you’re automatically subscribed to updates from the developer in Favoriteer, and if there’s a way to unsubscribe from that, I haven’t found it. It’s not so bad, though, because the updates are pretty infrequent. Still, it would be nice to have the option to turn all that off.
Final Thoughts
Despite the inability to read single feeds, I’m on board with Favoriteer. That’s not really a feature I need on a daily basis, and if I do want to just browse one site’s past articles, I have other readers that will do that. I like the single, clean stream of news I get from Favoriteer.
I wish I could import my feeds from another reader, but Favoriter has a lot of other great stuff going for it. It’s small and stays out of the way until I need it, and it looks really good when I finally do want to do some reading. If you’re looking to try a new RSS reader and want something that’s going to take up a bit less visual space, Favoriteer is a nice option.
     |