On Feedly

Feedly has billed itself as a replacement for Google Reader in recent weeks. After Google's announcement that their service would be shutting down in July Feedly  jumped into the conversation almost immediately, announcing that they would be releasing their own replacement and transitioning Google Reader users to their own Project Normandy once Reader closed down.

The quality of Feedly's back-end is impossible to determine at this time, but their user interface bears exploration as Reader users prepare for a transition.

Feedly follows many of the current trends in app design as they strive for "digital authenticity" (a term describing the move towards the elimination of textured interfaces and shaded 'buttons'). The app includes a "hamburger button" (Twitter), two "basements" (anti-basement Tumblr post), and a flat, card-based interface that are all becoming quite familiar.

As important as design is, it does not make a good app on it's own, and Feedly provides several features to supplement it's design. Sign-in is accomplished via Google credentials. It is possible to open the app and begin adding sources, but in order to sync sources across devices a Google account will be required.

By default the start screen is "Today" section. This section is a magazine-style layout similar to Flipboard (with a slide page transition rather than a flip). "Today" presents content from subscribed feeds in a "featured" section and pulls the most popular content from the subscribed feeds and organizes it by it's user assigned category. Like most functions of Feedly, the start screen is customizable and can be changed to the "All" screen (all content grouped in chronological order) or the "Must Reads" (content from sources that the user has marked as such).

The customization of the reading experience continues in with the ability to set the default mode for how the feeds are displayed. The modes include a full page mode with the title superimposed over the cover image, list mode with thumbnails and title side by side, and list mode with no images. From the list of articles the user can make a short swipe left on an article to mark it as "read", a long swipe left to mark all articles on that page as "read", as well as swiping to the right to mark articles as "unread".

Feedly also includes a "Saved for Later" category that the user populates by tapping a bookmark shaped button while reading articles. The function is similar to starring items in Reader. This is not the only way to save articles for later, however. Feedly also includes the ability to share to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pocket, bit.ly, Instapaper, and email from within the article. The app also allows a user to select favorite read-later, social, and browser services that are then placed in the top bar of the app rather than behind a menu button.

These aspects of Feedly are a brief glimpse into the customization available to the user. The app provides the ability to build the news reading app best suited to the users reading habits with a modicum of effort. While there is no way to account for every user's tastes, Feedly does a comprehensive job of including the most often used features used by news readers. The app will also be moving to a freemium model (Tech Crunch) that will include more features geared towards heavy users in the pay version. The app has seen massive adoption over the last few weeks with good reason and makes a strong case for a one stop replacement for Google Reader.