Google officially shut down their popular service Reader on July 1st, 2013 and since then, lots of other alternative apps & services have tried to take its place. Services like Feedly, Feed Wrangler & Feedbin have managed to attract a bulk of the customers. However, all the 3rd party apps had to implement each of these services (and others) and their adoption depended on their rate of implementation. ReadKit was the one app that surfaced and blew everyone away. ReadKit is much more than just an RSS reader. It originally started out as a Mac app for Read Later services. Today, not only does it support several paid and free RSS services such as Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever, NewsBlur & Feedbin, but it also syncs with Read Later services like Pocket, Instapaper (requires a Paid subscription) and Readability. If you want to avoid syncing and just manage your RSS feeds locally, you are in luck because ReadKit lets you do that too.
ReadKit has a three pane interface similar to what one might find in Mail, NetNewsWire or the official Pocket app. The first pane lists all your RSS subscriptions and saved articles from different services (which you can expand/collapse easily). The second pane lists the articles from each source, and the last one is the reading pane. The interface is clean and minimalistic. Buttons, although bit too small are placed logically. The first time you launch it, ReadKit might seem a bit too cluttered, but it will only take you a few minutes to customize its appearance. If you don’t want to be constantly reminded of the unread articles in your queue, you can easily disable it by selecting “None” in the Item count options in the Preferences -> Appearance. Changing the font to Helvetica (or Avenir) and increasing the article width by a bit makes the experience a lot better. ReadKit has a lot of options, so you can customize it just the way you want. If you still miss Reeder, switch to “Corporation” theme from Appearance menu in Preferences and take a trip down memory lane.
All the basic functionality that you would expect from an RSS reader app is present here. You can Share any article, send it to the Read it Later service of your choice, favorite articles or tag them so you can find them easily later. I love how you can drag an article to the services in the sidebar. The taskbar at the bottom of the window is your gateway to ReadKit. You can browse by Folders or Tags, toggle Read/Unread articles, Add or Remove subscriptions, tag articles or switch to fullscreen article view.
ReadKit was recently updated with a shiny new icon and considerably better sharing options. You can now share articles on Facebook, Twitter, Messages, and Mail, as well as save articles to Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, and Safari Reading List. One of ReadKit’s break out features is its Smart Folders. If you have more that few dozen subscriptions in your feeds, Smart folders will be really helpful. It can help you pull specific topics and keywords for different feeds. Extended sharing options like saving to Evernote and Pinboard, and features like Smart Folders and support for multiple RSS and Read later services make ReadKit a must have reading app for Mac. ReadKit is available on the Mac App Store for just $4.99.