Cream Is a Beautiful News Reader for Mac that Brings the Best Stories to the Top Automatically [Mac Downloads]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/I0uqNMNAVmw/cream-is-a-beautiful-news-reader-for-mac-that-brings-the-best-stories-to-the-top-automatically

OS X: Cream is an RSS News Reader for the Mac that's a feature-rich feed reader in its own right, but what makes it really special is that the app knows which stories are the best and most worth your time reading and floats them to the top so you can go through them first. As they say, "the cream rises."

Cream offers one-click import from Google Reader, and its method for determining which articles and feeds are "creamier" than others is impressive: the app watches as you scan, read, ignore stories, even within a particular feed. That means that Cream not only can float the feeds you like to the top, but the specific types of stories from those feeds to the top—so if you like Android posts over iOS posts in your Lifehacker feed, for example, Cream learns this and shows you what you want read first.

At any time, you can switch between a list of the "creamiest" stories, all feeds organized alphabetically, or all feeds organized by date. Like any good feed reader, you can see everything, just unread feeds, and unseen feeds that have come in since the last update. Click any story to open it in a pop-up panel on the right or open it in your default browser. If you see a long article and want to save it to Pocket, Instapaper, or Readability, Cream supports all of these things.

When testing Cream, the only downside I noted is that while importing feeds from Google Reader is easy, Cream doesn't sync with Reader, so as you read stories they're not marked as read upstream. I asked Cream's developer about this, and he noted that Cream was designed to be a supplementary tool to your main news reader so you can quickly see the newest and best stories you don't want to miss—with the assumption that you'll use another app to clear them out later, and if you use Cream exclusively, you may not notice anyway.

In any event, Cream is $5 in the Mac App Store, and worth a look if you're looking for an alternative to our favorite news reader for Mac, NetNewsWire, or my personal favorite, Reeder.

Cream ($5) | iTunes App Store