I have a 90 minute commute to work and about an hour of that is on the train. To make my ride more entertaining, I use my iPhone to listen to music, browse the web, and read up on my RSS feeds with Google Reader.

Google Reader is OK but it’s a web page based app. Frequent page reloads, jumping to a new page in another browser window is not the best experience. So I downloaded and installed Reeder for the iPhone and have not been sorry. It’s $3 that was well spent.

I generally do not like RSS feed clients. The one’s I’ve used on Windows were just wrappers for Internet Explorer (ugh!) and felt like crude hacks. But on a whim I installed the beta Reeder for the Mac and have been playing with it.

It’s a clean app and so far I like it. Since it’s a beta it is not-quite as filled out on the Mac as it is on the iPhone, but that’s probably because I’ve not found all the shortcuts.

The best feature I like is that when I get an excerpt in my RSS feed, I click on Readability and the full post comes up. It doesn’t work on all feeds such as Gizmodo but clicking the link will bring up the post within the app. The articles are all well laid out and the view is easy to read.

The only thing that I can see is missing is easy navigation to the next article; it supports swiping but haven’t figured out how to do that with a magic mouse. I’ll keep playing with it, this beta is definitely worth the time.

Update: Ha! Read the funny manual. Keyboard shortcuts work fine.