Introducing Lire
Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP
Lire, from www.lireapp.com,just received an award from Applevis.com. It’s the editor’s pick this month and for good reason.
Lire isn’t just another RSS reading app. It does some extra work behind the curtain to enhance the reading experience. Specifically, Rather than just presenting the short excerpt of an article, which most feed readers supply, then requiring a link click which takes you to the website to finish reading, Lire retrieves the entire text and caches it. This sounds like just a bit of time savings, but in terms of usability, the entire experience is changed.
After selecting an article, the entire text is presented, and reading can begin immediately. While not needing an always-on Internet connection is an advantage, the true benefit comes from not having to negotiate a myriad of websites just to read a bit of content. As we’ve mentioned before, RSS readers tend to produce a more consistent structure for content and also cut down on unnecessary or inaccessible parts of web pages like advertisements or Flash videos.
You will have to decide if Lire is worth the $5.00 cost. It is fully accessible and comes pre-approved by the Applevis community. Currently, it only syncs with the Feedly service, though you can of course search for and add feeds by hand.
