You know I love to hear from developers who are making good use of my open source or commercial components in released apps. A shining example of lat is Ziner.
Ziner is the latest entry in the battle for the best Google Reader client, fighting it out with other heavyweights Reeder, Feedly, Flipboard, Mr. Reader, FeeddlerRSS and Newsify.
I asked Ziner’s developer Jay Zhao to share with us a bit of the back story of Ziner.
Making of Ziner
(in Jay’s own words)
As we know, there are already a lot of Google Reader clients on the App Store. So why do I bother creating another one? Because they all failed to meet some of my criteria:
So before I set out to create Ziner two years ago, I commit myself to solving all the problems they have and combining all the good stuff to create a Google Reader client that I want to use everyday.
After 18 months of hard work, Ziner is now released and it truly excels in many aspects. For example, Ziner is really fast in syncing with Google Reader! You get all feeds synced within 4 seconds, the latest articles appearing within 7 seconds and all articles downloaded within 1 min. (Tested over Wi-Fi, 10000 unread items, 448 subscriptions). Yes, even faster than Reeder.
Ziner’s render speed is much faster than other RSS readers. See for yourself in this video demo:
How about other Google Reader clients?
Take Feedly for example, when you tap a summary to read the full article, you always see “loading…” and only after a while can you see the full article. “Loading…” is really annoying and in Ziner you hardly see it except in the very first loading stage.
The great speed of Ziner is attributed to DTCoreText from Cocoanetics, a library that helps you convert HTML & CSS to Core Text, thus increasing render speed dramatically.
You can get more info about Ziner on its website and it is available on the app store.
Categories: Reviews
I’ve been using Ziner since it‘s Beta, it’s really fast and really beautiful. I can not even notice it’s loading, switching between articles & feeds is smooth. Ziner now makes RSS reading an enjoyment. thank you all the developers！
Performance is not all that matters for an app. This news-reader has problems in usability, espacially for users which don’t want to read only the abstract of all articles in the feed but read selective and with all details.