Weave for Windows 8 in the Windows Store

Weave for Windows 8 was soft-launched this weekend and is currently available in the Windows Store. I love using Weave on my Windows Phone (tried and deleted many others) and I have been waiting since last October for the Windows 8 companion app. While the wait was frustrating, the result is nothing short of excellent. I tried and deleted  a boatful of RSS newsreader apps. None of them came close to what Weave offers. An app that presents your preferred RSS feeds in an easy to navigate/read format.

When you first open Weave there are a few Categories pre-defined for you. But you can delete or edit those, as well as add additional categories from a pre-defined list of twenty-seven. Within each category, there are groups of pre-defined source feeds. Simply select them and the most recent articles will be downloaded to your device. That’s not good enough? No problem. For example, I created a Category called Local News. Of course, there were no pre-defined feeds, so I did a simple search for Orlando Sentinel local news and Newark Star-Ledger (NJs largest newspaper). Just like that I created a category filled with Local News that’s important to me. The screen is laid out with new articles, sorted left to right, top to bottom. After viewing an article it becomes grayed to let you know what you haven’t already read. Articles will open to the right side of the screen when you click or tap. You can save any article as a Favorite, change the Font Size, or Share via Twitter, Facebook, One Note or Mail. Eembedded videos will play from within the article, without opening any other screen. If you prefer, you can click View in Browser to launch and view an article in IE. Swipe in from the left and you are back in Weave where you left off. Click or tap outside the article to close and return to the current Category list of articles. You can pin any specific Category or source feed within the app for quick access. Everything works smoothly and quickly on all my devices. I have already used Weave on my 24” desktop, Surface RT and 8” Acer tablet. All the devices were equally easy to navigate, sort through unread articles and read.

But that’s not all. You can login through your Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts and your feeds will be synced across all of your devices. So you can start reading news on one device and then pick up on another device, not needing to remember which articles you have already read. My understanding is there are plans to bring this same synchronization to their Windows Phone app, but that may not be implemented for another week or two. I can’t wait.

If you are a news hound like me, you are going to enjoy Weave. They are still working out a few little nits and bugs, but that won’t keep you from enjoying this first version of an excellent app. Go fetch it in the Store now. Oh, did I mention it’s FREE! And that includes Ad-Free. What’s not to like.