ThOR debuts, brings The (new!) Old Reader to Symbian

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The story so far... Google Reader gets canned and a flurry of RSS aggregators (i.e. news collectors) appear, of which The Old Reader, being closely coded to resemble the original, looked promising. However, huge demand caused the developers to start closing the service, only for a USA company to step in and fund the operation. What's all this got to do with Symbian? Well, there's now a full Symbian client for the service, ThOR (derived from 'Th'e 'O'ld 'R'eader).

ThOR runs in similar fashion to (and obviously shares much code with) the developer's NewsBlurQt, an app that does much the same job for NewsBlur customers.

From the description for ThOR in the Nokia Store:

Features:

  • Subscriptions management
  • open in preferred browser
  • search for keywords
  • next/prev item when reading
  • mark unread item/list
  • basic qwerty/dpad support

Here's ThOR in action:

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Logging into The Old Reader and (right) seeing the unread counts on all my feeds. If I seem a little behind with my reading then it's because I've been using Feedly for the last two weeks(!)

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Tapping through into a feed shows the headlines and first couple of lines of the RSS text; (right) tapping through again gives the full RSS text.

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Toolbar functions then let you share the story directly, as shown, or (right) open up the story at its original URL in the phone's web browser.

You can buy ThOR in the Nokia Store for £1 here. ThOR's clearly a first draft of a client and has a few rough edges. I had a few issues with logging in at first, which seem to have been related to case sensitivity for the login used, plus trailing spaces after auto complete - the developer is making this more robust for the next version. In addition, it's far too easy to exit the app by accident. Plus the search is somewhat unintuitive, only searching in feed names from the home screen - I think more explanation should be given on screen to the scope of the search at each stage.

I'll post again, with a full changelog, when ThOR gets its next update, since this application could prove very useful indeed...

Source / Credit: Nokia Store