And the Only Prescription is More Cowbell

June 30, 2009 at 3:10pm

Fever is a new $30, self-install, feed reader from web icon and prolific coder Shaun Inman. Inman’s other product, which I use on this very site, is Mint. It’s peachy keen. I enjoy a beautiful application with great functionality. I like an OK looking application with great functionality. I even care for a beautiful application with solid functionality. Fever is an application that teeters the line between solid and good. Random pictures splattered through for your viewing pleasure as well.

Overview of Fever

It should be noted, for full disclosure purposes, that I asked for a refund on Fever (without reading the no-refund policy). When I discovered this policy I said to myself, “self, might as well try and make the biggedy-best of it”. So I’ve been using it since its release. I only say I asked for refund to point out that I’m not bitter, or at least not bitter about this application. I’ve been to the mountain-top and used the NetNewsWire and the Google Reader, so what’s it like looking at Fever from my perch?

I have about 104 feeds that I check on a daily basis. A lot of them are frequently updating and filled with the chocolaty goodness that is information. For this review I added several popular constantly updated feeds including Google News, Ars Technica, etc. I wanted to “feed a fever” as the saying goes (don’t see why Google News is much better than binge-drinking and blow though, but alas no feature existed to import those…2.0?). I was hoping for a magical experience where my attention was heavily focused as fever’s main goal is to provide a temperature gauge that tells you just how damn hot, red hot a topic is. Indeed, I enjoy Hot Topic as much as the next vampire, but Fever’s choices seemed almost asinine.
Take for example this one “statement”:

103.6 degree fever for “statement”. Another one title “Dropbox” appeared down the line. This gives me nothing.

Let’s face a terrible truth here, 103.6 degrees is extremely hot, near brain-melting. As any hot topic goes I would expect at least a decent title maybe even one that snaps the synapses. While I understand a “statement” is important I don’t understand why it couldn’t have been given a type… “declarative” for example. Obviously, it was big news that the Pirate Bay was sold, so it’s doing its job of picking the news. I don’t read Techcrunch, for example, because I’m not compelled to stab myself in the eye every 20-30 minutes. It’s just not me. So Fever does a good job of using Techcrunch as a “Spark” for its “hot list” but keeping it away from my navigating eye-line. I rarely, if ever, look at this area. It’s pretty but not great.

Feed Reading

Fever is slow. I have 104 feeds. It takes about 2 minutes for Fever to refresh them all. This does include items like Ssparks, but I only have about 10 of them from very fast, well-tested sites. This isn’t impressive. Even less impressive is the lack of an automatic refresh. This is a limitation of the PHP setup, and there is a way around it. Inman even kindly presents a customized cron job copy-and-paste solution in order to setup a type of refresh. Now, as a developer I’ve given cron jobs on the street like it was Christmas in freebie land. If you saw the word cron job and immediately started having seizures, you’ll have to manually refresh and wait 2 minutes every time.

It should be noted, that once the cron job is setup it works well. This comes into play with the iPhone web-app.

Actually reading the feeds once they’re loaded is an entirely different pleasure.

Beauty, is Fever’s biggest selling point. The beauty of this application is engrossing.  It’s a three column layout which is set at a fixed-width that you can change in the preferences. It highlights and shows hover actions in a graceful and beautiful way. You can tell when or what you’re doing very easily by its well-done UX responses. The icons are helpful and intuitive and it’s very easy to find your way around the application on first-glance. This is a triumph of beauty and is the best looking feed-reader around.

It is its saving grace.

Fever is highly customizable. Fever’s default settings weren’t to my taste but were easily changed to match my taste. For example, by default Fever will provide a concise summary of the feed, and if you select it or hover over it, it will display in full. You can turn this off by going to Settings -> Preferences, selecting “display”  and uncheck “excerpt items”.

The shortcut keys are great: “s” saves an article to the save bin, spacebar elegantly moves the browser viewport down the page and the right arrow opens an entry in a new window. They’re very intuitive and well thought out. As far as the actual reading and moving through feeds goes, Fever is responsive, kind and gives you a giant slap on the ass as you walk by. It’s enjoyable!

Additional Features

Of course, feed reading alone might not sell you on giving up that $30 you’ve been saving for that Naughty America subscription. So there are features other than the “Hot” and actual reader.

Yes, you can export your bookmarks from any application into an OPML file and Fever will import it easily keeping your folder structure alive. This is very well done.

Adding a feed is also simple, with a bookmarklet that takes you to a page with many options. You can set the feed as a Spark, meaning it’s not one of your day-to-day reading feeds but a temperature gauge feed. You can title the feed whatever you like (I usually leave mine blank to default to the feed’s default) and add it to a group. You can tweak the displaying of feeds, making the sort order of each individual feed either newest first or oldest first. You can change it to just text or just text with images or “unfiltered” which is a direct vein into the feed’s visuals. You can set group defaults in each of these areas. It is highly customizable and each feed can be custom tailored to do its own thang. You can also add authenticated feeds, something which Google Reader currently does not allow.

There is one problem however, if you add a feed and don’t give it a group, it doesn’t really appear unless you turn on “Show read” or hit U and click on the “all unread” nav item. Personally, if I add a feed I want to be able to select it and go back in time through it. For space-conservation and clutter reasons however, it’s my belief that Inman relies on search to get the job done. It DOES get the job done for finding specific things, but casual browsing is a bit more convoluted in its processes. 

Search is lightning fast, feeds are cached. If you know what you’re looking for you’ll find it with ease in Fever. If you want to browser back through time, you’ll be able to do that with ease with Fever. If you want to find cool new feeds, you’ll naught find yourself a tool for that in Fever.

Finally, I’d like to note the install and update process which deserve special mention. Install is a pretty standard PHP & MySQL setup, and is easy to do. The process of entering your unique serial and loading up the application is wonderful.

Even greater than that though, is the way Fever updates. It’s a technical marvel the likes of which I’ve never seen. Shaun is able to update Fever remotely. I assume there is some push and pull mechanism built into the software, but one day you’ll log in and see that Fever has been updated to its most recent version. It is fantastic. It is well-done. I hope he adds it to Mint.

iPhone

Fever, additionally comes with an iPhone web-app that mimics and minimizes the functionality of Fever for portable form. It’s just as beautiful as its bigger brother but lacking in the functionality depo. Most popular feed readers on the mac have an iPhone app and Fever does not. I tested fever on my iPhone 3G and an iPhone 3Gs and found different results.

On a 3Gs the animation is smooth and the reaction time quicker. On a 3G the movement is chunky and the UI less responsive. While it’s understandable that a 3Gs is faster, I feel the design took a cost in usability for the aesthetic. Much could be done to simplify this for the lowest common denominator, but the 3G isn’t the lowest, it’s the mid-level denominator.

Also, you can’t refresh.

You can’t refresh your feeds.

Let me say that again, this time with bold text: you can’t refresh your feeds (and no one cares for your company)

With the previously mentioned cron job, this is overstepped, however the speed of the UI on a 3G makes this “not cool man… not cool”. The iPhone web-app is gorgeous though and looks amazing displayed on any screen. All functionality is available to you except the refresh. It works intuitively, scrolling and moving as your iPhone has trained you to make things. It also supports landscape mode, a custom app icon and a cool loading screen. You can’t add feeds through the iPhone web-app, but you can look at your hot list and find all the useless data visualization you need to, beautifully laid out for mobile. Did I mention everything looks like a bottle of Coca Cola Classic post-New Coke? It does. It does indeed my friends (I’m running out of synonyms for good-looking here).

Conclusion

I can boil this down for you simply.

If you’re an aesthetic loving whore (which I welcome to my tribe with open arms) who loves to customize the crap out of their experience and own an iPhone 3Gs, while being able to do minor server administration, and have authenticated feeds: Fever is for you.

Or if you love Shaun Inman and everything he touches.

You can’t demo Fever (there is a video on its website), and there are no refunds. If you already have a feed-reading solution, and are good with it (you don’t have to love it), Fever isn’t for you.

It really is pretty.

 

View Twitter Comments » Copy this link for a short URL

Follow Kenny @kennymeyers

Magical Tweets