Today I want to look at two RSS readers. One application is from Google – a program called NewsRob. The other one is RSS WidgetBoards, which is completely unrelated to the NewsRob.

Let’s start with the NewsRob. This application is a client for Google Reader. After you install the program it will ask for your Google user name and password, and once you enter these, will give you access to your RSS and Atom-subscriptions.
The main screen shows a list of your subscriptions. This list is uploaded from the Google Reader, so you can sort your subscriptions by creating new categories. Two categories that cannot be changed are “all articles” and “listen subscriptions”, which include all podcasts.

The figure on the right shows the number of unread articles, news or materials for each category. To open a list of subscriptions simply click on the required category. Read articles will be automatically marked with a yellow star. It looks like you need to scroll to a certain point for the article to be marked as read (it is probably some sort of % of the total length). You can also mark your favorite news or articles with a star. Separate category will be displayed on the main screen if you have any “starred” articles.

NewsRob supports both vertical and horizontal views.

If the article/post contains a video, it can be opened from the application.
Quick menu allows you to mark the active article as read, or open it in the browser. Additionally you can share news/articles with your friends using other applications installed in your phone (e.g. Facebook client, email, SMS, Twitter, etc).

NewsRob has well organized and powerful settings. You can choose synchronization periods, select the behavior of the client when it’s not connected to the Wi-Fi, set notifications for new articles \ news, set the number of articles to be kept in memory, etc.

The program has two versions: Pro and Normal. In addition to few interesting extras provided by the paid Pro-version, you can use an interactive desktop icon showing the number of new entries.

The second application I wanted to discuss today is a very nice widget called RSS WidgetBoards. Widget has three sizes: S, M and L, respectively, small, medium and large. You can choose one of these sizes when adding the widget to the desktop. Below screenshots show small and large versions, medium looks similar to the small one, but occupies the entire width of the screen.

Widget’s functionality is the same regardless of the selected size. When adding a new RSS feed, you can choose from a list of pre-selected feeds, or manually add a URL in a special field. If you choose to manually add the URL, don’t  forget to specify feed’s name, or you will only see an empty tab.

You can choose the color of the widget.

On the screenshots you can see the RSS feed of this site. Click once and you’ll see the list of all articles. The second click will open the selected article in the browser.

Conclusion.

The first program will be especially useful for the users of Google Reader, and the described widget will be useful if you are used to reading RSS feed headers. The downside of the widget is that if you want to read the article, you will have to open it in the browser, which may be undesirable. I am personally using NewsRob on a day-to-day basis and recommend it to everyone.

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