Read Is Just As Simple As Its Title
Read ($2.99) by Maximilian Mackh is a bare bones reader.
The main screen offers categories from news to sports, with a variety of websites and blogs for each category. A database is available for adding your favorite sites that don’t happen to come included with the app.
If your favorite site isn’t there, you can send a request within the app to the developers. The app’s site mentions that the developers are adding more sites to it every day.
The articles are mostly presented as just text, though some of the sites will show at least a picture. You can customize the font size, as well as the typeface, and a setting will change the display for day or night reading. Seeing just text is great for distraction-free reading, giving it more of a newspaper feel.
Swiping to the right brings up the next article, or you can see all of the headlines by selecting a button in the top right corner. Tapping on the article’s headline will open the website where it came from. Sometimes this will be necessary, since some articles only show the opening excerpt.
In addition to only showing the partial article, some of the articles are interrupted by random bits of code mixed into them.
Another sticking point is swiping to select the different sites, which is often a case of having the right touch. I would swipe down, but instead the app opened up the site my finger touched. When swiping wasn’t a problem, the actual site took too long to load.
For $2.99, Read is a hard sell. Granted, it’s less expensive than Reeder, but with all of its shortcomings it isn’t enticing enough for me to bite.
