If you want to always stay ahead of others, then its a good idea to subscribe to RSS feeds of various popular blogs. That way you’ll always be the first to know about the latest news and updates from your favorite website or blog. Google Reader is an online RSS reader which is very popular. You just need to subscribe to the blogs that you want to follow and then you can start reading all the latest posts right from Google Reader’s interface.
The interface of Google Reader is very minimalist and focus is on reading instead of other features. If you’re using Google Reader, then here is a desktop RSS reader which allows you to view your RSS feeds offline also.
WebReader – Google Reader Desktop Client
WebReader is a full featured Google Reader desktop client. It uses Google Reader account to access your subscribed RSS feeds right from your desktop. WebReader is built on Adobe Air platform and therefore before downloading and installing the application, you’ll need to install Adobe Air first.
WebReader’s interface is simple, clean and minimalist. For such a program, the focus should be on providing the best reading experience and that’s what exactly WebReader does.
Download WebReader, if you don’t have Adobe Air already installed, then you will be prompted to install it. After the installation, you’ll be prompted to sign-in with your Google Reader account.
Click on “Login with Google” and enter your login credentials. As soon as you sign-in, you’ll see the RSS feeds that you’ve subscribed via Google Reader. If you have not added any RSS feeds, then click on “Add a feed” (from top left side) and enter the URL for the website or blog that you want to subscribe to. Next, you’ll see all the feeds displayed from that site. Follow the same procedure to add as many sites as you want to. You’ll also be able to see featured image of each posts.
Notice small buttons at the rop right side of the screen. You can mark all posts as read, change font size to big fonts, view full posts, view only summary or view only titles.
From the left sidebar, you can click on the website/feed name to view feeds from that particular website. But that’s not all, you can also search in all feeds for some phrase.
Open “settings” by clicking on the drop-down menu next to your name. From here you can configure WebReader as per your needs.
Check mark “launch WebReader automatically” if you want to launch this application upon starting windows. If you want to view the RSS feeds offline, then check mark “Off” which will change this option to “ON”. This is very useful when you’re going offline for sometime, but want to continue reading your feeds.
WebReader for Blackberry Playbook
WebReader RSS News Reader is also available for Blackberry Playbook. This app is specially built for Playbook and it’s designed for performance, long reading session and for minimal battery consumption. You can also read your favorite news feeds even when you don’t have an internet connection, just like the desktop version. You can download this app from Blackberry App World.
WebReader is a very useful desktop application to read RSS feeds of your favorite websites. If you read a lot, and don’t want to sign-in to Google Reader every time and want more features like changing font size, offline support, search and minimalist look then this is the app for you. Plus, its free!
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