The NewsBlur Redesign

My favorite online feed reader, NewsBlur, launched a major redesign last night. NewsBlur’s biggest drawback has been that the JavaScript-heavy user interface occasionally got in the way of users rather than assisting them. This redesign attacks that problem head on. The upside of NewsBlur has been that it works really well at its core purpose, fetching feeds and displaying them for the user. It also has solid native mobile clients, enabling you to keep read status in sync across devices. Finally, the entire source repository is available through GitHub. You almost certainly won’t run your own NewsBlur instance, and you probably won’t be submitting patch requests, but the transparency is appreciated. Finally, it offers social features that are comparable to the ones that Google Reader killed some time ago. The clock is ticking for Google Reader, and I strongly encourage you to check out NewsBlur.