Last Fall Google made significant changes to their Google Reader service that removed the ability to follow others Shared Items and share your own. Instead they pointed all of the sharing to their Google+ service instead. Since that would not produce an RSS feed for my shared RSS links via my Tweeted Links posts and on Twitter I left it behind and found a very viable alternate in the form of Fever Reader.
Fever Reader is a solid, self-hosted solution to aggregating your own RSS feeds and provides the ability to share links via its web interface. Unfortunately there are no apps for Fever except for the iOS platform and that does not help me at all.
I have been wanting a solid option to not only share RSS items from my desktop and tablet, which by the way, are easy using a web browser. However, using a web browser on my Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone is not possible from a user interface perspective as the targets are just too small.
What I really needed was an ability to sync the changes to what has been read and starred on Google Reader between all of my platforms. Well last night I discovered that solution thanks to a new app in the Windows Store – Flux. It just hit the Windows Store in the last 24-48 hours but has already collected two reviews for an average of 4.75 stars.
Well as I was trying Flux out on Windows 8 last night I also discovered that the same developer, Edoardo Turelli, has a version of Flux for the Windows Phone. Turns out it is quite popular as well with 200 ratings for an average of four stars. It costs .99 cents US but I am never adverse to paying for quality apps and software.
The two UI’s take advantage of the systems they are installed on and are not exact duplicates of each other in the way they appear but their functionality is consistent across both systems.
This now means I can update my shared RSS items, by starring them in Google Reader via these apps, both when I am mobile and away from home as well as on my desktop and Windows Phone. everything remains in sync between the different versions of the app no matter where I do the sharing at.
On a slightly different subject but related to apps on Windows 8 – I am starting to see a trend in that they are starting to gain real functionality and in turn I find myself testing more of them out as I run Windows 8 through its paces. I can now see myself using the Windows 8 UI apps more often on my desktop as the functionality grows.
Have you found a Windows Store app that has changed the way you use your OS? Let us know about it in the comments.
