This is a stack of DVDs which has lived in my flat, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, until this week.

The movies are all ones that I would want to keep during a normal spring clean. Of course they are. They’ve survived many a clean, and many a move. Where they aren’t, they are ones that Karen loves. They have been taking up space, and space in a London apartment is at a premium.

None of them have been watched in this flat.
None of them have been watched at our last flat.
None of them have been watched at the flat we lived in before that one.

That flat before the last one on that list was the last one we lived in where we had a DVD player. We got rid of it during the move, because we watched DVDs using the Playstation, and didn’t need a separate player.

The Playstation was abandoned during our last move; we no longer played games on it, and only watch DVDs once a year, at Christmas. And computers have DVD drives.

Well, my computer has a DVD drive. Karen’s doesn’t. New laptops tend not to.

It’s strange to watch DVDs become obsolete — and we have been dragging these around, packing them, moving them, unpacking them, putting them on a shelf. Repeat.

No more, old DVDs. No more.

Goodbye.

Next up on our Reader Replacement Rendezvous?

Pulse.

Pulse seems decent — a free news aggregation/RSS site. I’m not terribly fond of the way it categorizes things into newspaper-like sections (News, Sports, Technology, Style, et cetera), nor am I entirely clear on how to re-organize things in a manner I’d like. That said, it’s easy to navigate and read, on both my PC and mobile, so here we go …

Offline support

We’re now checking this first, since it seems to be the hurdle where everybody falls down. Does Pulse do offline support?

Yes.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Now, it’s not perfect — it seems that images, other than thumbnails, are not downloaded. And the app has managed to eat 1.77 GB of 3G data over 48 hours (compared to < 0.5 GB used by my current reader, over the last 30 days, which does offline support including all images in the post). But the text is there. THE TEXT IS THERE! I can actually read things.

Of course, not things about photography, or most humour blogs (which tend to be photo-heavy) or anything with important graphics. But given that this is light years ahead of everything else I’ve tried, I will say thank you, pulse.

Importing Google Reader Settings

While having something functional is a wonderful step in the right direction, I follow a lot of things on Google Reader today. And while starting over from scratch seems well and good, it’s also probably just a big pain in the ass; after all, I have not once been tempted to unsubscribe to every single RSS feed and start over again.

Luckily, pulse has a dead simple importer. Couldn’t be easier.

Of course, much like offline mode, this isn’t perfect. It pulls in all your feeds, but doesn’t distinguish between read and unread posts … so everything is unread.

That blog that was taken down in 2010, and is now well forgotten? Well, you never unfollowed it, sir. So all those posts are sitting there to be read again.

Additionally, pulse sorts your RSS feeds from Reader into categories. But not useful ones. They are Uncategorized, Uncategorized 1, et cetera. It’s up to you to reorganize them into something useful.

How?

Beats me. The only way I can find to move something from one category to another is to delete it from the first category, and add it to the second.

This, of course, is pretty damn useless. It would seem simpler to print out a list of blogs I subscribe to, and add them in Pulse myself. I would avoid the whole zombie-blog problem that way, too.

Adding new feeds

Another key element to an RSS feeder is adding new content, and removing old.

Removing a source is dead simple — click the X. Confirm.

Adding a source is more complicated.

Pulse is clearly imagined as a news aggregation tool. So it defaults to the giant blogs (BoingBoing, Buzzfeed) and traditional news sources (BBC, AP). These are simple to add.

RSS feeds are supported, but clearly an afterthought. There’s a search box, and it seems to find things pretty well, but it feels like it could be a little bit hit and miss.

The final verdict

Pulse seems the same across the board: Functional, but flawed.

It does everything that I want of an RSS reader, but there are flaws in every aspect — whether it’s the organisation of content, the offline support, the data usage, or adding content.

That said, it moves ahead of Feedly today, into the pole position. Ticking all the boxes, however poorly, is better than missing some.

But I am very much hoping it doesn’t stay in top spot.

If you’ve been stuck under a volcano, without internet access, let me refresh you:

Google is shutting down Reader. So, like everybody else who uses it, your intrepid blogger is looking for a replacement. We are, however, having trouble finding things. Particularly ones with offline support.

We smacked down Feedly and The Old Reader, on the basis of a lack of offline support. But they seem to be better than NewsBlur, which has just enough offline support to make you feel properly ripped off by their subscription fees and lack of a decent user experience.

So we have moved on to netvibes. Which I’m not sure how to spell properly. If you go to the site, your tab will read “Netvibes”, but your screen will say “netvibes”, with “net” in white and “vibes” in green. It’s all very confusing.

There’s one point down.

Netvibes almost got a short, one line review, thanks to not having an app (like Old Reader), but their FAQ says this:

The version for smartphones is available on iPad, iPhone and Android. It has a reader view, an offline mode…

Offline mode? How does that work?

Ah. It doesn’t.

Next?

Back on Tuesday, I indicated that I would be reviewing the RSS service NewsBlur for the next few days.

I thought it was going to be far less time, and a very short review. The first thing I saw when registering was this:

Luckily enough, this doesn’t – or, at least, didn’t – actually prevent the creation of a free account. It might by now, however, so a try-before-you-buy option for NewsBlur might no longer exist.

It did for me, though. So I can continue with the review …

Setup

The basic setup is easy — importing your Google Reader settings and installing the Android app are both simple.

NewsBlur has built-in facility to easily share blog posts you enjoy with other users, and a learning mechanism which allows it to filter the material you enjoy to the top of the list. It’s hard to say if the latter is working — free accounts are limited, and I’ve not had much time to “train” the reader.

Look and feel

Using the service is where it starts to go downhill.

The “framed” look of the main site seems dated, and it’s a pain in the ass to read a site on the main website. This is simply because the “down” arrow key moves the reader to the next article. When I’m not using a mouse — which is pretty often when I’m just sat there reading things — it becomes horrendously annoying.

The mobile app doesn’t allow the saving of stories for later, or to adjust the NewsBlur‘s learning, though it does allow export to Evernote, for items I want to view later.

Offline support is better than Feedly — the NewsBlur app seems to download text (but not photos) for a handful of blog posts when it connects to the internet, allowing some reading to be done offline. It’s not enough, however, and the lack of photos is troublesome, given the number of photography blogs I follow.

But the main problem is this:

The app crashes, regularly.

And I don’t have a bizarre setup — a Samsung Galaxy S3 running CyanogenMod 10 should arguably be the best supported Android fork out there: the most popular hardware with what is essentially a stripped down to vanilla open source Android OS.

The bottom line

Unlike most of the options, NewsBlur operates on a paid subscription model; users are expected to pay for access to the service.

With money changing hands, however, a certain level of quality is expected. The browsing experience in NewsBlur, however, is worse than any of the other options tried so far. Using it would mean, literally, spending more to get less.

This is unacceptable.

Based on this, the reigning champion of the solutions tried so far is Feedly. Our criticisms still stand, and we fully expect to find a better option.

But NewsBlur ain’t it.