The Best News-Reading App, Reeder 2, Returns To Mac

For all five of us who still prefer managing our own news-reading experience through a dedicated RSS reader application, there’s good news out today: One of the best news readers on the market, Reeder 2, has finally returned to the Mac. The Mac application had been unavailable for nearly a year, following the shutdown of Google Reader, because it was built on top of the search giant’s infrastructure instead of its own.

Catching up with your favorite websites via RSS may have been too geeky a task for a mainstream user base, and therefore not a Google-scale business, leading the company to shut down its once-beloved RSS news-reader service, Google Reader last summer, as you may recall. But RSS is not quite dead yet, even if Google has exited the building.

In its wake, smaller companies picked up where Google left off, including Digg (with its much-hyped Digg Reader), as well as another betaworks-operated service called Bloglovin‘, which is focused more on female users interested in fashion, beauty, interior design, and food. But it’s companies like Feedbin and Feedly that really stepped up to save the day with API platforms for developers building RSS applications.

Because when Google shut down Reader, it didn’t just kill a product, it killed an entire ecosystem.

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With the return of Reeder (aka “Reeder 2”), the company now offers a desktop news reader that works with multiple services, including Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever and Readability. And if you don’t want to rely on a third party this time around, Reeder supports local RSS, too. If you go that route, however, you wouldn’t be able to sync your progress across platforms – and Reeder for iOS is a pretty great news-reading client. (I use it with Feedly, and it’s my go-to RSS reader these days.)

Like its iOS counterpart, Reeder 2 for Mac offers a huge host of sharing services, including Facebook, Twitter, Messages, Mail, Safari (Reading List), Quote.fm, Buffer, Readability, Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, MarsEdit, Pinboard, Delicious and App.net. And it offers the same simple interface as the mobile client, allowing you to easily switch between unread, starred and all items, toggle items’ read/unread status, favorite posts, organize feeds into groups, and more.

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In addition, the Mac app offers a handful of themes to choose from, ranging from light to dark, support for gestures via the Mac’s Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, and customizable shortcuts.

For those who still enjoy a solid, well-built, and design-oriented news-reader experience, dropping $9.99 on Reeder 2 is going to be a no-brainer. For everyone else who’s like, uhhhh what’s RSS again? does this work with BuzzFeed?, well, thanks for ruining the internet. (Ha, kidding!)

The point is, with Reeder 2, it doesn’t matter if you know what RSS is; you can just add some websites you like to read and start enjoying them.

Reeder 2 is here on the Mac App Store.

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