Newsrob for the Droid outdoes Google Reader

If you're a high volume RSS feed consumer like I am, managing all that comes in can get to be a real problem. I manage it by having a few topical folders, a favorites folder which draws from all topics, and a skim folder. Generally speaking, I want to glance at everything in the favorites folder while the skim folder often just gets reviewed on the basis of title.[1]

The trouble is that it's hard to go fast through the skim folder. Hotkeys help of course, but mark all read is quite a blunt instrument. Newsrob Pro is my droid reader of choice in part because it has two key tools that help:

1. Mark read until here. This marks all items above the current one as read. This is a vast improvement over Reader's options to mark all read or to mark items older than a week or two read. Now it's easy to clear out my skim folder in bite sized chunks rather than dealing with whole folders at a time.
2. Pin an item. Pin adds a third status to read/unread. The key point of pin is that ignores mark all as read and mark read until here. So if you're just looking to clear out items fast you can pin the ones with interesting sounding titles and then just mark read everything else.

Together, these have left me in the bizarre situation that I find my phone app has more functionality than the one I use via my web browser. Maybe that just means that I should switch to using my email client as a reader. I'm not claiming that Newsrob had these features first, so if anyone knows where they were invented let me know in comments and I'll update this. Similarly, if you know how to pull this off in reader please let me know. However, for now, Newsrob Pro makes me happy and I'm glad I dropped the fiver or so it took to get the full version. One caveat, you do need to login to your google account via the app and I know that's a legitimate concern for a lot of people.

 

[1] Admittedly, I do have some feeds that make both the favorites and the skim folder. These are ones that I like but are higher volume than I have appetite for. Also, most of what I get through friends' shared items goes in the skim folder.