I’ve had Fever for nearly 4 years now. As Shaun Inman's newest project after Mint, Fever was the HOT new topic around the block and everyone was jumping onto the bandwagon. I did too. It was a convenient new take on consuming RSS feeds and as a technology journalist & enthusiast, I used to subscribe to a lot of feeds (mostly Apple sources) back then. Fever offered an easy way to keep up with the news without actually diving in and reading though the clutter. But there was a problem — Fever was a web-only product and that meant there was no comfortable way of accessing it on my iOS devices. Especially in 2010 when I got my hands on my iPad. The original, first-gen iPad made for a great on-the-go reading device and I really hated that I couldn't browse Fever on it. Until Ashes came along.
Released in 2010, Ashes was a slick & sexy native iPad app fueled by the Fever API. When I first discovered it, I included in the list of iPad RSS apps to look forward to on Smoking Apples. It had a bold UI with some very stunning colors and offered a great way to browse Fever on your iPad. It was a good start and Brandon agreed too. Here’s what it looked like back then.
Last week, Ashes made its way back to the App Store in a whole new form. Now boasting a fresh new coat of paint on the UI, the new Ashes app still makes use of bold orange color scheme & looks great. It’s now a Universal app, so you can use it on your iPad, iPad mini, iPhone or iPod touch.
Once you sign in with your Fever account, Ashes will sync your feeds and have them ready for your consumption. It issues a notification once the sync is complete and your feeds are ready. You can select the "Hot Timeframe" ranging from 1 Day to 1 Month and starting as early as Now or as old as 5 weeks ago. Changing this is just a tap away using the icon at the top right.
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You can easily browse the Hot section — the core feature of Fever — or use it the old school way and browse the sources in Kindling (or sparks). Your feeds are neatly laid out for you and reading the text is crisp and clean. Tapping on a feed item loads the article while tapping and holding down on it loads the article in the in-app browser sheet. While reading, you can save the article in fever for accessing it later or you can share the article to Facebook & Twitter directly or use your favorite apps like Tweetbot, Netbot, Riposte, Twitterrific & Buffer (some coming in v1.1). Ashes also supports "Read Later" services Pocket, Readability & Instapaper. A simple swipe from right to left will mark a feed item as read while in the feed item listing view.
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Ashes is a very beautiful attempt at bringing a comfortable way to consume Fever on your iOS device. However, the v1.0 of Ashes that’s available on the App Store has some very terrible lag & performance issues, making the app almost unusable. The developer is already hard at work on v1.1 which improves performance a lot and the beta that I'm currently playing with is a HUGE improvement indeed.
If you use Fever regularly or have a license but don't use it because there's no decent iOS client, Ashes is something you should definitely get from the App Store. It’s currently on sale for $5.99 and will go back to its regular price of $8.99. With Google Reader dying in July, a lot of new services have cropped up that are mimicing Reader's functionality. But so far, Fever's the only service that stands out with what it offers. And Ashes only makes it better for you.