A Look at Together and Monocle

I have been switching between Alltogethernow and Monocle as my feed readers, both run thru Aperture as their microsubserver. There is a lot I like about both of them, but I do have some problem with each of them. First a little background I spend ninety percent of my time on my iPad pro with a Logitic keyboard attached, on rare occasions I will go to do something on my mac mini attached to an old Samsung monitor, but that is only if I am forced to. I log into both services through my Micro.blogaccount.

So with this as a background I would like to look at each service indivually. The first is Alltogether, (aka Together) being worked on by Jonathan LaCour aka @cleverdevil and Grant Richmond. I like that the option to reply, save as unread and the link to the full article are clearly available under all articles. That you can easily switch from card view to list view. That you can easily mark all articles read with a click of a button and the notification bell. Although I love the ability to reply to an article for some reason when I try to do a reply on the page I get an error message, but if I go to full editor mode it works fine. I miss having keyboard shortcuts for Together on the iPad, I miss them on Monocle also. The final issue I have with Together is that scrolling seems to be slow and occasionally stutters when I use it. The slow scrolling usually throws me over to Monocle which is being worked on by Aaron Parecki who also created Aperature. The scrolling on Monocle seems faster to me, which is Monocle’s main strength for me. To be honest if Together scrolled faster I would probably stick to that. I miss the ability to go from list to card view on Monocle and the ability to mark all articles to be read at one click. One of the feeds that I follow in both Monocle and Together is the Discover feed from Micro.blog in Together I can reply to indivual post. Unfortunately, that option is not available in Monocle. Although when the reply option is available in Monocle I never get an error message.

Despite my complaints, I recognize these are side projects for them so I really do appreciate all the work both Jonathan LaCour, (@cleverdevil) Grant Richmond and Aaron Parecki (@aaronpk) have done on these programs.