Leaf - RSS News Reader App Reviews

… you lucky guy have a license of Little Snitch to blog the initial „Hello, a new user has purchased me“ to the Developer and the preset RSS feeds. Leaf looks pretty cool , but does not really take care about ressources and privacy. It comes with a short preset list of RSS feeds which you probably don’t need or like - anyway you get spammed with them and you have to remove them manually. Asking to subscribe a newsletter is also something anoying - as a App Store customer you have the App Store for Update-Notifications. The other thing is the preset configuration. Refreshing each 5 minutes is a little bit too much. Specially if you have some feeds to follow, it’s a drain for the battery on mobile devices. Keeping read items for 2 weeks is also a bit strange. But that’s it too - not much more to configure here. Adding a feed is somewhat strange. I need 3 attempts to add the apple developer feed. So if you want to pay for it bee aware of the spamminess and the bugs. If you don’t care about it, you will get a pretty reader app. But you might consider evaluating the competitor...

Wheres the fever support?

Please add option that the app preloads news in background, it would save time.

Great design, great reader. I like it, I use it. But a huge lack of available settings: Adjusting the design of article view, setting up how the article view is supposed to behave, changing wrong icons of subscriptions. Plus: The »Add subscription« works worse than in other news readers (it actually doesn’t find any feeds automatically at all – you always have to add the whole feed URL).

With the last update the integration of Evernote was added. Great feature, just activate it in the settings and you’re done. Great feature and you don’t need to pay for adding sharing features!

Ads are really annoying! I would like to be able to read stuff from my Pocket account.

best so far

It’s a great app which does everything I need it to do. It looks great too! Just wish it had two little features: 1. Menu bar integration to A) indicate there are new incoming news to read B) show/hide the Leaf window 2. Auto subscription when clicking an RSS feed in the browser

Like it so far. Great looking and not too much clutter. But would love a button to change the article list view though

Best RSS reader on OS X! Would highly appreciate an ios version with icloud syncing. Keep it up

Indeed a nice looking reader, but strangely very limited: – No support for Inoreader – Not compatible with FeedWrangler streams

Its a pretty standard google log in but it doesnt work and its where all my feeds are so without it working, the app basically doesnt work. Yes, you CAN subscribe within the app, but I already have my subscriptions, so thats a no go for me. The weird thing is that it DOES see my starred items, so it can log in to my account… lame... and a bad first impression.

I absolutely love this rss reader. Its fast, it has a small footprint and I love its notification center integration. That said, I havent updatedto the new native version. The real value of this reader is its sync capabilities. Feedbin looks like a fantastic sync service thats being adopted by Reeder. I truly hope that Leaf follows suit. Leaf on the mac and Reeder on iOS is the killer RSS combo!

I use this app because I am a casual RSS reader. I like the clean interface as well as the newsfeed style. It is a beautiful app and I havent run into any issues yet. Definitely get this if you are someone who is a casual RSS reader, love clean interfaces, or if youre waiting for an official Feedly app.

Very clean and elegant!

Overall, the app is quite good, with an interface that is *just* modern enough, and syncs to Feedly very well, but there are a couple of points which frustrate me. When you open the app for the first time, a popup with a bunch of the dev’s other apps comes up, and will continue to do so unless you check a box. Seriously, guys, that’s disrespectful to your customers who paid to use your app. Secondly, they had a popup asking me to rate this app. I decided to to give them a piece of my mind. I understand that apps live and die by their ratings, but I’m not a huge fan of devs nagging me to rate. Thirdly, there is no refresh button - you must go into the menu to do so, which is bad when it’s in fullscreen. Fourthly, there is no way to turn off the dock badge. I don’t care how many articles I haven’t read - my use for the app is casual, and it isn’t imperative that I read EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE. Finally, there is no way to open the webpage for the article within the app. It is possible to have an optimized view (think Instapapaer) show the entire article, but not *just* the webpage. I hope that this is rectified in future versions. Don’t let these stop you from getting the app, though. I works quite well, and is very usable and pretty, but in a good way. Their implementation of a LOT of sharing options is also swell, especially Instapaper integration. It’s good, all-in-all, just lacking some important options.

Needs major work. The UI is all-or-nothing in several ways. * Keeps downloading and marking unread the same stuff over and over. * Needs folder / feed list to the left. * Can’t crack down to look at a particular feed, only by folder. * When on folder via, can’t filter only unread or starred. * Its hard to tell what is read and what is not in the list. * Etc. Bottom line: It trades usability and flexibility for simple look. Well, it’s “simple” alright - but I wouldn’t call it “elegant”. I am a computer professional and have used several feed readers across PCs, Macs and the Cloud. My primary computer is a Mac.

First, there is an annoying bell that alerts you everyone a new article is downloaded. Maybe this is a useful feature for some users but I find it jarring and when first opening the app one must endure 15 minutes of constant dinging which is not how i like to enjoy my coffee and news in the morning. Amazingly, there seems to be no way to turn the alerts off! Leaf also seems quite slow to load articles - slower than any of my web browsers. It’s great that there are a bunch of themes for articles, however most of them use a font in the body of the article that is far too low contrast: “White Background” has a grey font, “Coffee" is light cream with a brown. “Dark Background” is the only theme with legible contrast but white on black strains my eyes. These themes may look pretty in screen shots but they are crap for reading! Why can’t I adjust the font and background colours myself? If the developers were not going to give me, the user control over this then they should have taken more care designing the theme templates because it’s kind of a deal breaker when they are illegible. Still not impressed. Please fix this app. As it stands, I wish I could have my money back. I don’t recommend you buy this app. Note that this review is only a slightly updated version of the one I wrote for version Leaf 2x. Unfortunately, much of what was wrong with the previous version continues to be wrong with the version 3x.

The idea behind the app is great. Not sure if its a new build or a bad update but its making it impossible for me to add new feeds. Once this bug gets fixed im sure it will be good.

This is a fine reader. I like its implementation of gestures. It fetches articles completely after processing with Readability (?) and performs well. Overall an 8/10. Perhaps theming would be useful or an icon newsfeed counter.