RefreshingApps.com

Bad me a bit of a long period without an update. Well I have been preparing my presentation for Max Europe so that’s my excuse! If your heading over to Milan make sure you say hi.

Anyway back on with business. Scoop is an Adobe AIR powered RSS reader that integrates with Google reader. What makes “this app”;http://www.scoop.uk.com a little special is that you can integrate with multiple Google Reader accounts. I personally use multiple reader accounts so having a capable offline / online AIR application is great.

Scoop is an RSS Feed Reader with offline/online Google Reader syncronization built in. Keep track of multiple google reader accounts simultaneously.
Read, tag and star your scoops/posts on the train and Scoop will syncronize your changes with Google when you’re back online.

The developer Nick Kuh has done a great job on this beta version. When started the AIR application takes you through adding your Google Reader accounts into what Scoop terms ‘profiles’. Within the main UI you can then switch between these profiles.

Lots of the Google Reader functionality is currently not present in Scoop. For example when adding a star to a feed item, there is no way to just view your starred items. I would like to see another tree item for starred items and also visually star the feed in it’s list so you could easily scan the tree.

Nick has outlined some new featured that will be arriving in future releases. They include mark all as read (you can do this already by scrolling through your posts
but there’s no button at the mo) and an integrated search feature.

Design Eye

Nice simple looking app that looks quite standard Flex. I’m not sold on the 3d flip effect between the edit and main panels, a nice quick smooth transition would suffice. The tree view on the left is clear with nice iconography.

The offline functionality is nice and fast. There is an offline / online visual indicator although a red dot in the left corner of the app window needs to communicate itself better using a larger more descriptive icon or textual description. That said it does remind you of the last sync time.

Technical Eye

Built using Adobe Flex 3 and AIR 1.0. The panel that shows the feed item detail is a HTML component powered by the AIR wekit engine and styled using CSS.