Percolater For iPad Offers An Alternative Way To View Feeds, But Falls Short
Percolater ($4.99) by BuzaMoto is a reader for the iPad that lets you retrieve feeds from your favorite sources, then repackage them into organized stacks of pages.
Percolater imports articles from Google Reader, Twitter and your other favorite sites via RSS.
The app (which works in landscape mode) is divided by popular, feeds and favorites from the main menu. Feeds are displayed three across with four overlapping pages in each.
To view a feed, tap it to launch a very useful feed previewing pane. This view is my favorite aspect of the app. Tap the square graphic (bottom left) to reveal scrollable pages or flick up or down to quickly browse for a story that catches your eye.
Swiping to the right will launch a full page view of the page, which includes options to save to your favorites, load the source or email.
The biggest issues I've found with the app are with adding and syncing feeds, which is unfortunately quite a manual process. You'll need to type each URL to add the feed, then tap the feed icon to retrieve new updated pages. Unfortunately, each time you launch the app, you'll need to tap each feed's icon again to load new updates.
Syncing is also a slow process. For example, using a 40Mbps Wi-Fi connection, it took approximately six minutes to import 29 Mashable feeds. This unfortunately makes the app almost unusable for me.
Also, I am not a fan of the background and the app doesn't yet offer any additional designs or ways to customize.
The app has potential, but falls short. With free, feature-loaded apps such as Zite, Pulse and Flipboard, you may want to pass on this app.
