Unread for iOS got acquired by an awesome developer!

I always hoped app.net would have become a new Twitter.

Not only was it friendlier than Twitter towards developers and users, but I was delighted every time I had to interact with it: I was using Riposte. If you followed the previous link I can tell you that I share Manton’s opinion:

Riposte is arguably the best social networking client out there.

The developer behind Riposte, Jared Sinclair also developed another delightful app: Unread, a beautiful RSS reader for iPhone and iPad.

Unread, luckily, didn’t end up the way Riposte did. It was acquired by Supertop, but, due to the success of Supertop’s other app, Castro, it did not get the attention it deserved.

I was therefore delighted and scared when Supertop announced that they sold Unread to Golden Hill Software. Delighted because the new owner has more time to work on it, and scared as what change is always scary.

Being scared turned out not to be such a unjustified feeling: the 1.7 version broke my set up with Stringer, a self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader¹.

Basically Stringer offers a Fever-compatible API. The new version of Unread tried to do some smart things with the API, that Stringer was not offering.

I immediately wrote to John, Golden Hill Software’s owner. He quickly replied that he would look into it.

A few days later a new version of Unread came out but, alas, no fix for my issue.

I was kinda disappointed. I had to wait for the next release.

But no. John wrote me saying he pushed a PR to Stringer fixing the issue.

What a great developer! If you’re on iOS, please give it a spin. As a bonus, the newest version merges the iPhone and iPad version, which is timely as I realized some months ago that Mr. Reader, my favorite iPad RSS reader, was not developed anymore.

So give it a go, and support a great developer!