More blogs and publications mentioned the app, and it quickly became the RSS client to have. A couple of blogs (including ours) reviewed it, and sales skyrocketed. Reeder for iPhone was released in the App Store last year and no one noticed it. So here’s a brief and concise recap of what happened on iOS.
Reeder for Mac (beta) screams “iOS” from every texture. It’s so obvious even by looking at a couple of screenshots. This story is based on a single, undeniable and, looking forward, really important concept: Reeder for Mac is an iOS app that comes to the desktop. So sit down, grab that coffee you’ve come to love in your late night Instapaper sessions, and follow me into a retrospection of Reeder, and what comes next with the Mac version. If you do love Reeder for iPhone and downloaded the tablet version as soon as it showed up in iTunes, this is the story you want to hear. If you’re not a fan, you can stop reading now. If we really want to keep playing with the dead / alive metaphor, we should consider the app that gave birth to this whole “Silvio Rizzi sets out to reinvent Google Reader clients” odyssey: Reeder for iPhone. Reeder for Mac, just like the iPhone and iPad versions before it, wants to be different. NetNewsWire was great, thousands of users still refresh it every day for their daily Google Reader fix. I don’t want to talk about what the past RSS readers for Mac gave us. Here comes Reeder for Mac to redefine the rules, conventions, UI decisions and navigation schemes of RSS on the desktop. It was just looking for a new desktop house to spend his retirement days in. RSS isn’t for my father or my average non-tech savvy friends, but it definitely isn’t dead. Just take a look at Instragram’s numbers.
Especially when it comes down to apps and services, everything can be dead or excellent in a matter of a few weeks. Truth is, Twitter users, Instapaper lovers and Foursquare dwellers don’t know what “dead” means anymore. Some claim saying “something is dead” is dead. Perhaps the most difficult to accomplish. After an enormous, and maybe initially unexpected, success on the iPhone and iPad, developer Silvio Rizzi set out to create the best new desktop RSS reader. RSS readers for Mac have been ignored for too long.