Fever offers a hot new approach to reading feeds
Fever is a new feed reader that calculates the "temperature" of your feeds by asking you to group them into essential and occasional categories, and looking at how they relate to one another to create a "hot" category. It's like your own personalized, automated Digg. It's the brainchild of Shaun Inman, one of the most respected designers around, and the UI looks great and seems intuitive.
Here's the catch, though: Fever's not a desktop app. It's a PHP/MySQL app that you host on your own server. This offers several advantages: you can access it from anywhere, you can filter ads by blacklisting advertising domains, it updates itself automatically, and you can use cron to make your feeds automatically refresh whenever you choose. Fever is powerful, but I'm sure some people are going to balk at installing it, despite the very nice video walkthrough on the site.
If you don't mind running Fever on your server, but you're the kind of person who really needs an icon in the dock, you can run Fever on the desktop using Fluid, which turns web apps into standalone browsers. Fever also has a very, very nicely-done iPhone-optimized design, so if you're checking your feeds from an iPhone, you're in for a treat (without having to download an iPhone app, even).
Here's the catch, though: Fever's not a desktop app. It's a PHP/MySQL app that you host on your own server. This offers several advantages: you can access it from anywhere, you can filter ads by blacklisting advertising domains, it updates itself automatically, and you can use cron to make your feeds automatically refresh whenever you choose. Fever is powerful, but I'm sure some people are going to balk at installing it, despite the very nice video walkthrough on the site.
If you don't mind running Fever on your server, but you're the kind of person who really needs an icon in the dock, you can run Fever on the desktop using Fluid, which turns web apps into standalone browsers. Fever also has a very, very nicely-done iPhone-optimized design, so if you're checking your feeds from an iPhone, you're in for a treat (without having to download an iPhone app, even).













Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsJeffJun 18th 2009 11:50AM
Here's the second catch: It costs $30
AndrewJun 18th 2009 12:00PM
I kept looking around that website, desperately trying to find a reason that it should cost $30 to download a web application, host it myself, and then not get major updates. I could understand if it was a multi-user system or offered anything more than google reader with clever naming. Also, a live demo isn't possible? Come on.
jakeJun 18th 2009 12:40PM
It costs $30 because it's freakin' awesome. The "Hot" section is the greatest thing ever if you follow a lot of feeds and miss a day or two. It lets you see any important stuff that all the blogs are buzzing over with a quick glance, and then you can get back to your regular reading again.
Also, the iPhone version is FAR better than Google Reader.
Christina WarrenJun 19th 2009 11:25AM
Agreed, I'm going to do a full review/write-up that'll run today or tomorrow. I was skeptical about its awesomeness, but I'm a big fan of Mint and Shawn Blanc recommended it, so I was sold.
After actually using it for a few days, wow! For people who have serious feed needs, it's pretty brilliant. I just wish there was a mutli-user option, this would be perfect for small groups.
Eric D.Jun 18th 2009 12:51PM
I'd love to see a native iPhone app for this with configurable push notifications :)
Then I'd probably pay $30.
jaydtJun 30th 2009 3:20PM
Biggest problem is that you need to have domain *name* for Fever to run on – it’s not enough to run it on a computer and access via its IP address. As far as I can tell this is an anti-piracy tactic. Surely there must be better alternatives than this. Further to this – two emails to the author have gone unread in over 2 week. I’ll certainly be keeping my $30 and not dealing with this developer. Ever.