Paper Pile - Virtual Newspaper Review

The Early Edition, even with its flaws, spoiled us as far as RSS readers go. Google Reader integration is even headed to that app in an upcoming update. Paper Pile attempts to build on that app's success (creating a newspaper-esque experience) by adding a number of cool features, but in its current form, it has enough aggravating problems to keep it from excellence.

The goal of the app is simple: create an RSS reader that simulates reading a newspaper. Add your feeds (done easily in the app, even more so than The Early Edition), separate them by category (news, sports, games, iPad, or whatever else interests you), and watch the pages proliferate with stories. At first glance, the app appears to be successful. Navigation is easy: pull down a visual menu up top to select a specific section or simply swipe left or right to move about between pages. It falters, though, when it comes to the stories themselves.

The problem seems to be in how it handles the text from the feeds. All formatting has been stripped out, making the text run together. If there are paragraph breaks in the original text, for example, those are gone. The authors' thought transitions in the piece, then, become painfully absent. To make things worse, because of the missing breaks, sentences become smashed together without so much as a space to separate them.

The app also arbitrarily (or so it seems) gives some stories more space than others. At times a story will be display in full; other times, it cuts off midsentence. If you want to finish the story, you have to click and hold the story and choose Go To Source from the pop-up menu. This opens the full web version; the transition back and forth is pleasant enough, but it's a pain to have to do that for a story that may end up being inconsequential.

The app does still have a lot of things going for it. You can easily e-mail the story to someone (it pastes an image like a newspaper clipping in the e-mail), and you can copy the story as either text or image to paste elsewhere. You can also choose to open a story in Safari if the built-in browser is having trouble with it or if you want to bookmark it for a later read.

The optional division into sections is the app's greatest strength. When you have lots of feed that you read, being able to logically sort them is a joy. With some formatting fixes, this app could go far, but as it stands,all its great features don't amount to much when the actual reading of stories is frustrating. An update to the app is planned, so we will likely revisit it once that happens. For now, save your money or check out some of the other great RSS readers in the App Store.