I’ve written and re-written this post many times. Originally it was going to be my usual sales-pitch with all the details, features, use cases, problems that it solves, and the journey I took to get the current product ready. I was doing all that because it was interesting to me to think through the process from the start and look back on where things ended up. Writing posts like that take a lot of time and energy and I’m just not feeling it right now. However, I do want to share what I made, so here’s the gist.

RSS

There are posts like RSS Feeds under the Collections category that describe what RSS is, so I won’t repeat myself here. What is important is that RSS is a simple way for you to stay current on when a website updates. An RSS reader is how you read and organize that information. It’s how I’ve been reading news since Google Reader was released back in 2005.

Echo

Echo is my RSS reader that was created from scratch. It does everything I want and cuts out a lot of extra bells and whistles other apps bundle in. It shows you the news and it does it extremely well.

Features

Let’s see, it has themes. I typically use “Pitch” because the purple and black is cool.

Feeds are managed from the settings UI. That makes life easier than having to manually edit the backend JSON file.

Every link is routed through the Squeak API, so it automatically strips tracking for every link you click.

It has a share option where it publishes shared items to an internal RSS feed. Mine is routed directly to mcwain.net/stream through some Python scripts.

Oh, and every YouTube RSS feed is linked to Hush - which I highly recommend that you give it a shot. It strips all the crap off of Vanilla YouTube and can be customized to how you want to watch videos.

There’s also a custom lightbox for reading comics. I self-host a random daily comic from Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbs, Dilbert, and more (links in the RSS Feeds post) and it’s difficult to read them when they’re stuck in an article container. With a lightbox, you can click on the comic and it fits the width of your screen.

EchoPod

Since we’re on the topic of RSS and news, I made a podcast app too.

Same idea. EchoPod automatically updates and trims old episodes, defaults play speed at 1.5x, and has themes. That’s it. It does what it does and it does it well.

Both of these apps are mobile-friendly and are used extensively by me daily.

There’s a lot more cool stuff to share, but my family is visiting this week and I’m particularly low energy. Hopefully that turns around and I can get back to doing fun stuff again.

Download

If you want to download a copy and modify either to your liking, here you go:

• Echo
• EchoPod