Few months back I realized that all the stories I read in my slashdot or ars-technica feeds seemed kinda … stale. Why? Because most of the interesting ones I had already read - through links posted by the people I follow on Twitter. It is now a cliché to say that Twitter is the fastest medium of spreading news. Consequently, it's the news channel that delivers the latest news. Moreover, it's the news that you care about most; because it is coming from the people you have chosen to follow.
So how can a modern news reader be complete without incorporating this real time news channel.
In v1.3.2, ReaderScope introduces Social Channels.
You will see a third tab "Social" when you start the upgraded ReaderScope. You will find a preset Twitter subscription there. When you tap on it, you will be asked to login to Twitter (if you haven't already). Once it gets Twitter credentials, you can tap it again and it will download you twitter timeline. It won't show you all the twits (that is for dedicated twitter clients). Instead, it will go through all the twits and will pick the ones that have embedded links in them. ReaderScope will fetch the stories/pictures/videos pointed to by those links and when it's done, they will be presented to you as news items (with the original twits as yellow subtext).
How do you like that?
You can also schedule the Twitter subscription for periodic download.
You will see lot of other improvements in this version too, especially the item list (it now has author and timestamp, right in the list). The news fetched from Google News channels, looks fresh (unread) now; instead of dull in color. The unread counts have been fixed too.
On Podcast front: the ones that take too long "Preparing" (because of long time in buffering over slow network) can now be stopped.
So download the upgrade and enjoy.
And yes… in case you haven't noticed yet, ReaderScope is now accepting donations. ReaderScope is available FREE of cost for everyone to use. Some users who are avid news readers, will see great value in it. While others may not. So it's up to you to decide what's ReaderScope worth to you. If you can express it in terms of $, you will help towards further development of ReaderScope. You can find the donate button on this page
… better yet, let me paste that button right here. :)
Thanks for all your support. More features are coming to ReaderScope. Show your support and help it improve.
Cheers!