NewsSpot syncs your RSS feed with a choice of four online services; support for NewsBlur continues, but in addition you can also use feedly, The Old Reader & FeedHQ. These services have each staked a claim to be the one to take over the sync role that Google Reader once had at the start of the year, so it's great to see NewsSpot supporting all four of them. While some people have moved on to Facebook and Twitter for discovery, using RSS is still preferred by many (which includes ourselves here at AAWP).
The recent updates have focused on the engine and back-end code for the app, which will be great news for regular users, but NewsSpot does demand you use it in a certain way to get the most from it. From our review previously:
Depending on how you want to read the articles, NewsSpot is going to be wonderful or frustrating. Although you can organise your RSS feeds into folders on NewsBlur, you can't separate out the feeds when reading on NewsSpot. So if I want all my Eurovision feeds in one long ribbon of headlines, that's not a problem. If all I want to do is read the headlines from a single site (such as the official Eurovision.tv site) then I'm out of luck - or the option is hidden away in a maddening place. Either way, it's something that is missing from the app.
Which is a shame because a lot of thought has gone into the user interface. While every headline can be tapped through in the application to be read in a secondary screen, after that you have a number of options to help read the app. The obvious one is to open the page in Internet Explorer and get all the layout, images, and website backgrounds. You also have a readability mode in the app, which parses the content of that feed item through a basic browser engine to improve the layout of the text, and bring in some images and media.
The full change-log can be found here, but the major changes from the version we reviewed in September are:
- (WP8 only) Improved prefetching of articles
- (WP8 only) Articles are now prefetched so that swiping between works much better
- Fixed bug: Live Tiles were not displaying correctly
- Fixed some severe memory leaks
- Improved Evernote sharing (especially for HTML5)
- Added note that favorites are only stored local when using The Old Reader
- Fixed bug: when being tombstoned from an article view and going back, the wrong article is displayed
- Fixed bug: when being tombstoned and returning to the app, a crash could occur
- Fixed bug: help texts on settings dialog are wrong
NewsSpot is available from the Windows Phone Store. The free trial version is limited to a maximum of 200 synced articles and 50 starred articles, with the full version being unlocked for £1.49/$1.99. Here it is in our AAWP App Directory.