One of the off-shoots of Google Reader, with a passionate fanbase, is Feedly. However, for a while Feedly was a Firefox only plugin, so I never could quite use it. They said they were doing something for Safari users, and apparently about two months ago, they finally offered up a preview.
Feedly is a magazine styled newsreader, based on Google Reader and Twitter. It presents news in a clean and concise way, so you don’t have to deal with the ugliness that is Google Reader. As for the ‘preview’, it’s a fairly crude, but ultimately working solution. You have to be logged in to Google Reader, after which you just launch the file saved on your hard drive, and the feedly interface takes over.
By the looks of it, it certainly isn’t as technologically powerful as Fever, but it’s certainly a step up above the usual Google Reader interface (Helvetireader or not). There are no unread counts, and the layout is pleasing to the eye. Moreover, since it’s powered by Google Reader, your unread counts are synced over to and from an iPhone RSS reader such as Reeder. The perfect use for this is to stuff it into a Fluid app, the procedure of which is explained here. If the last two weeks that I’ve had it installed, it’s been a joy to use. I can’t wait for the final, more elegant version of the plugin for Safari.
