Review of the Fever RSS Reader

Fever List View

Fever List View

The premise of Fever is simple: your current RSS reader is full of unread items that you’ll never get through, you can’t keep up with the volume, and you don’t want to add more subscriptions for fear of compounding the problem. Clearly, Fever is aimed at RSS ‘power users,’ and people with only a few subscriptions should probably save themselves the effort and stick to a simpler solution like Google Reader or NewsGator. That said, can Fever really live up to the premise of saving you from second inbox overload?

Fever is the latest endeavor from venerable designer/developer Shaun Inman, creator of the renowned website statistics package Mint. At it’s core, Fever is a regular RSS reader, with the ability to group feeds and read through each feed, group of feeds, or all of your feeds in an attractive river-of-news style view. Like Google Reader, Fever has nice features like endless scrolling (loading more unread items as you approach the bottom of the current list automatically), but unlike Google Reader, Fever is self-hosted, meaning you must have a web server to run it on. Also going against the grain of online RSS readers, Fever costs money – US$30 to be exact. That’s a fair chunk of cash considering most other readers, desktop and otherwise, are free.

Fever Hot List

Fever Hot List

Beyond simple RSS reading, however, Fever’s banner feature and one thing that could make it worth the purchase for some is it’s Hot list. To use the Hot list properly, Fever asks the user to split their subscriptions into two categories: Kindling, which are your must-read subscriptions, and Sparks, which are less important and higher volume feeds. Once this is done, the Fever Hot list becomes essentially an automatic, personal Digg. Fever uses the sites that the Sparks link to in order to ignite the Kindling, bubbling the popular and active items to the top of the list. This means you can always see the most important items from your subscriptions at a glance, and leave reading the rest until later (or not at all).

This feature does have a few limitations though, most notably the fact that it can’t determine what is a link to a real news item, and what is a link to a home page, privacy policy, or other non-news pages. For example, if you subscribe to many Weblogs Inc. feeds, you will find that the Weblogs privacy policy hits the top of your Hot list very quickly, since it’s linked to at the bottom of every Weblogs post. Similarly, sites like the Twitter homepage, which seem to get linked to everywhere these days, will also run to the top. Thankfully, Fever has a URL blacklist, so once you spend a bit of time blocking these types of things, the Hot list becomes a pretty damn useful feature, showing you the news articles that are most popular amongst your subscriptions

Fever iPhone Item View

Fever iPhone Item View

One feature that is very important to me is a mobile version of the reader. Google Reader has a great iPhone compatible site that I use all the time, it’s a solid UI and quite fast, but Fever one-ups Reader’s mobile site by not only looking a whole lot better, but also bringing across the infinite scrolling from it’s full version. This means that when you are flipping down the page on your iPhone and nearing the bottom, it’ll load up more items in the background so can can keep on scrolling, making reading feeds very fast.

Fever iPhone Frame

Fever iPhone Frame

One thing I don’t like about the iPhone UI is that if you try to open an external link in a feed item, it adds it’s own frame to the top of the page, which would be fine if it didn’t mess up the view port every time you tried to go back to the reading list. This can be fixed with a quick change of orientation of your phone, but it is annoying none the less. This feature is necessary because of another Fever feature, the ability to be used as a chromeless web app. If you bookmark Fever on your iPhone home screen, it get’s itself a nice icon and starts up without the Safari UI over the top of it.

On the technical front, Fever was very easy to install. After setting up a database for it to use and running the compatibility checker, you need only enter your activation code  for everything to be set up and ready. Updates to Fever are pulled automatically, and you can automate the fetching of new feeds via a simple cron job on your server. It doesn’t seem like you can automatically fetch feeds at less than 15 minute intervals with the cron job, though the Fever UI has a refresh button you can hit at any time to reload feeds from the browser.

Fever includes a few niceties like a bookmarklet so you can easily subscribe to feeds while browsing, which is handy since Fever cannot be set as a default feed reader for your browser or operating system. Keyboard shortcuts are fully supported, and are actually more logical than those in Google Reader, and a pretty effective search feature is available.

Overall, Fever is an extremely slick, fast, and well-featured RSS reader. The Hot list feature is it’s main differentiator from Google Reader and other online RSS readers, as well as the ability to control the feed refresh interval instead of relying on whatever schedule the developer has chosen. It’s also a hell of a lot faster than Google Reader when browsing a lot of items – I find Firefox slows to a crawl with Reader after about 500 items, but not so with Fever. Is it worth $30? No, not when the RSS reader market price has bottomed out at $0, but for people with a lot of subscriptions, it is a great package. If you don’t mind parting with your $30, I can highly recommend Fever, but I think it would get a lot more users if it were priced at about $15. I’d also like the option of turning off the Fever header when clicking links on the iPhone version when running in full Safari, but otherwise Fever is almost perfect.

Comments

  • Jay Tyler
    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.
  • I'm not sure you actually need a domain name, just something that can be accessed from the internet. I agree though, it's a pretty big limitation for most people.
  • Jay Tyler
    You certainly do have to have a domain name, not good at all.
  • No, you insistent fool. You can run it off your home computer if you like. It just needs to be internet accessible. You can run it off shared hosting. You don't need to own a domain.

    But indeed, this is still unusual, and means that likely only tech people will use Fever.
  • Jay Tyler
    Don't be a twat - there's no need to be rude. You're also completely wrong. You are required to provide the domain name it's to be run on at the time of purchase. There is also an entry in the FAQ section which states 'No, Fever cannot be licensed or installed on a local machine'.
  • Tina
    He did not say that it could be licensed or installed, he said "You can run it off shared hosting." And look whose calling the kettle black here. Jay you are the only one being rude and mean. Take a chill pill! If you have such issues with Fever, here's a thought don't use it! Look that settles it. Now all is well in the world again, and hopefully you can breath again.
  • Shared hosting and a domain name are not the same thing Tina. You must have a domain name in order to run Fever. Fact. There can be no discussion about it. It's a Fact.

    I think that somebody calling me an 'insistent fool' is quite rude to be honest. Particularly when I'm right and he's wrong. He's wrong, I'm right and I'm the fool? I don't think so.

    You haven't taken the tome to understand the issue at all either Tina so I wonder what that makes you?

    Oh, and I don't use Fever. I would have done if it wasn't for this ridiculous copy protection scheme was not put in place. $30 still in my pocket. Fever doesn't appear to have sold more than around 3 copies anyway so the point is moot.
  • On your first comment you're dissing the developer... you can certainly save your measly $30 and not have to deal with one of the most influential and important developers in the community.

    That being said, this tool is meant for the power user, tech oriented blog reader and publisher, and web technologist that manages hundreds of feeds and wants to skip the noise that's inevitable if you follow the big players as well as a whole lot of small blogs in the industry of your choosing. And you are clearly not such person. Stop whining. If the tool is not for you because you don't have a domain this is clearly not the feed solution for you. Go use google reader. I doubt you have more than 20 feeds you read anyways.

    Everyone this tool is aimed for will gladly play $30 dollars and just self host it in their own personal hosting. You don't have hosting? You don't have a domain? You want to install this on your "home" computer? Again, you are obviously not the target audience. I'm so sorry but you come of as the type of kid that pirates all their software because you would rather save your money instead of supporting other peoples efforts. Fever is a great tool, and you'd be lucky to use such great software. If you're not up to it well go use any of the other tens (hundreds) of free feed reading softwares and move along.

    PD: I can assure you Fever has sold more than three copies. And even if it only sold three copies, the joke's on you since those 3 people are using a great tool and you're stuck complaining about how the author protects their software from people that want to steal it and avoid paying for his efforts.
  • Jay Tyler
    You seem to be very quick to categorise me as a 'simple' user and a software pirate. I don't think that is really productive to a reasonable debate.

    For the record, I already had my card out to purchase the software at the time I realised a domain was required. I therefore did not purchase the software. That's at least one lost sale.

    Regardless of how many copies have been sold, the volume would likely be higher if there wasn't such an unusual anti-piarcy measure in place. I realise the author must protect his work from piracy, as do all developers. However, I would argue that in this instance it's likely reducing the revenue from the software rather than achieving the goal of increasing revenue.

    It's also not good business practise to artificially narrow your target market as suggested in your 'Power Users Only' comments. As the developer is obviously talented, I would seriously doubt that this plays any part of the domain name requirement.
  • For some weird reason my comment got posted under another section of the comments feed. :S
  • Jay you seem to have made the mistake of thinking that I'm categorizing you into a internet user cliche while not really knowing you or what you do. I said you "come of as...", which by no means you are one, though it does mean you read (in the comments) somewhat like one. Don't get me wrong, since I don't know you I pretty much have to be careful about judging you, BUT I can judge the way you express yourself regarding the product and developer.

    That being said, I believe that I can express the point a little bit better. I'll be more specific: As a webdeveloper I tend to follow a non-trivial number of blogs and publications, but I find that although the main players almost always publish great materials, lots of smaller players publish filler material in between their golden gems. This is a problem for me because I can either unfollow the noisy blogs or bear with filtering the good from the bad. Shaun's solution requires a webserver with php. Therefore it's targeted to the power user that 1) has a website or at least works with the web in a way that requires him to have some kind of hosting available, 2) has a knack of liking selfhosting solutions such as email, webDav, etc... and 3) has a real hard time following his/her favorite sites because of all the noise in his/her feed. I'd be shortminded to think that people that selfhost solutions on their machines don't exist, but they are a minority and, by the way, is something of a characteristic of people that like pirating software (not saying you do, once again) since hosting ftp, webservers, irc bots and torrent trackers is a common occurrence. Again from the discussion here it seems like you're not the target demographic, and that's ok. You can say that the domain requirement is what kept you from using the software, but saying that it's wrong is far from being more than speculation or personal opinion.

    One last thing, you say you were ready to buy a 30 dollar piece of software to read your feeds, but requiring a domain put you off? If you'd pay that much money for a feed reading solution, I reckon you could have easily spent 35 or 40 dollars and got yourself a domain while you're at it. JayTyler.me is available for purchase FYI
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