XReader for Windows 8: Finally

I have been patiently (bullshit, I am as anxious as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs) waiting for Weave, the excellent Windows Phone news reader to make it’s way to Windows 8 desktop. They have promised some collaboration with Lazy Worm and maybe an app in June. But I have heard things like this before.

You see, I am somewhat addicted to Weave. It has become my go to source for everything newsworthy. Yeah, I have the CNN and Fox apps on my phone. And ABC, CNN, NBC, USA Today, TNW, etc. on my Win 8 devices, but they all lack something. And one big something is having everything worth reading in one place.

I discovered XReader this weekend, but it was somewhat broken. That got corrected a few minutes ago with an update and now I am all giggly. The lack of something like XReader is the primary reason I am still using my phone instead of my Surface RT to digest the news. The app is not perfect by any means, and I need to spend more time with it before I can provide a thorough review. But it is good enough for me to look forward to reading the news on a bigger screen tomorrow morning.

As regular readers know, I have a few criteria that put apps into that Holy Grail category. XReader requires you to create a login (simple user name and password – no other personal information). That means you can sync all of your preferences to ALL of your Win 8 devices, regardless of what you use to login. For me, that means my office and personal PCs all can be fed the same feeds. Fabulous. There is a collection of feeds that you can link to your subscription, you can search for feeds, or you can create your own. Fyi, Mobility Digest is; http://feeds.feedburner.com/MobilityDigest 

Here is what the developer has to say:

XReader is an online news aggregator for news feeds. It pulls your favorite news from almost any website with feeds and synchronizes across your multiple devices. All you need to do is log in to your XReader account and you can view your favorite news stories. It formats the content in a beautiful way in consistence with the Modern UI. The Windows Phone 8 version of the app is coming soon

• Support for all standard RSS, Atom and RDF feeds
• Ability to manually add a news source by URL
• Application wide search using the search charm
• Support for snapped mode
• Share articles you read on Facebook and Twitter

The current price is FREE, but it is ad supported. Hopefully, there will be an option to make those go away soon. Definitely worth checking out.