Sometimes we may only have time to read the headlines of articles, and if something piques our interest, we read the entire post. This is where RSS readers shine.

Newsflow is a free, customizable RSS reader

Newsflow takes RSS to the next level, it is a modern and pretty app. It has a ton of features which you may like. The main page of the app displays news from your feed, and by default it shows the thumbnail image from the article. You can change this behavior from the app's settings.

Global Settings

Hit the toggles for the "show images and video in news lists" and "...article" options, and the media should be disabled in the main page. This makes it look cleaner and distraction-free. The Settings pane also has options to animate elements, and a font size bar which is very useful. Other options found in the page include a theme selector that lets you choose among a system based theme/light theme/dark theme, all of which look good. The app can be configured to sync news in the background, or manually. Newsflow has read later and favorites options that you can toggle.

Tip: Use the back button in the top left corner, to quickly go to the previous page you were on.

Notifications, Live Tiles, Data

You can disable notifications completely, turn off the sound alert, banners, etc from the Notifications pane. The Live Tiles options have a few options like show news images, feed icons, unread count, that you can toggle.

The Data pane in Newsflow has an import option which lets you pick an OPML file (from your previous RSS reader), to add all your feeds to the app. An export option is available as well. The import took quite a while for me, but that maybe because I am subscribed to over a 100 feeds. If you have multiple computers which you wish to use the app on, you can use the Backup & Restore options. The Cache rebuild/clean up options can help you manage the app's storage.

Main page customizations

Click on an article in the feed to view it in the app. The top-bar has the Main, Deffered, and Favorites tabs. The search bar can be used for finding a specific feed or article. There is a view selector right in the top-center of the screen. This lets you switch to the following views:

Title Only View - Displays the headlines of articles

Cards View - Headline + first sentence + media (grid view)

Magazine View - Similar to cards view, but displayed like a list.

Article View - Large banner + headlines + article summary

Personally, I prefer to use RSS readers in a text-only view, so I set the title-view for all categories. It's nice for fast reading.

Tip: Every category has individual view selection options. So, you can set a specific view type for a category, and a different one for another.

Side-panel

The side-panel is where your feeds and categories are listed. You can also access your Sources and Settings from the sidebar. The Sources pane is where you can manage the content i.e., add/remove feeds, select specific feeds and mark them as read, see when the feed was updated, etc. Clicking on the three dot button next to a feed lets you move the feeds position, and more importantly customize the feed.

Tip: If you wish to view news from a particular feed, say Ghacks, click on the feed's icon to jump to the site's feed.

Feed Customization

The Edit screen lets you edit the Feed title, RSS feed link, description, and category. You can choose the number of articles that should be stored per feed, by default it is set to 500 articles. You can also set how often the feed should be synced (15/30 minutes, 1/3/6/12 hours, 1/2 days). The app also lets you toggle media content off for specific feeds, and also disable a feed from the main page.

Tip: Don't forget to hit that save button on the top-right corner.

You can use the Categories tab to create/delete categories, delete, mark all feeds as read, etc. The extensions tab makes it sound like it supports a ton, but in reality there is just one, and it isn't free.

I was a long time user of Feedburner, but moved on to other RSS readers like RSSOWL or Quite RSS. I tried web-based options like Inoreader and Feedly, and eventually settled on the latter completely. But I missed having a standalone RSS Reader, and the notifications that would pop-up. Newsflow looks like it could fill that gap.

Summary Author Rating 2.5 based on 11 votes Software Name Newsflow Operating System Windows 10 Software Category RSS Reader Price Free Landing Page https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/newsflow/9nblggh58s5r

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