You’re welcome! And I was just thinking, that $30 barrier to entry is the perfect way for Shaun to vet his target audience. Of course, there are practical reasons for not granting demos, but I have to imagine it’s also nice to keep the signal-to-noise nice and high in the customer base.

But, having used Fever for almost a month, I gotta say…I’m really, really disliking the iPhone web app for one main reason: Most of my disposable time is congruent with subway rides. Not only that, but even on the 3GS, the CSS animations are just too slow. I haven’t looked too deep into the code yet, but I don’t think he’s using the hardware-accelerated animations that WebKit supports.

Anyhow, I still LOVE the standard version (in conjunction with Fluid.app). But, without integration with a kickass iPhone experience, I feel like I’ve abandoned my “safe” NNW setup, and invested heavily enough in Fever that I’m kinda feeling “in limbo.” Hell, if I knew there were an API or something, I’d feel a little better.

My problem is that despite having watched the screencast etc, I didn’t fully comprehend the uselessness of the software unless you happen to subscribe to a LOT of ‘low signal to noise’ feeds. The only really useful feature is the Hot list. Otherwise it’s like any other newsreader in which you really need to read everything. What Fever does is look at everything in your Sparks list, then look at everything in your Kindling list, then create the hot list based on how many things are replicated across the two lists.

The other problem is that the vast majority of my newsfeeds (and I only have a few dozen) do not really replicate each other. I only have one or two gaming news feeds, a handful of photography news feeds, a load of photoblog feeds (each with unique content), some webcomic feeds (again, unique content), Daring Fireball (replicates other links from sites I don’t subscribe to anyway, and unique comment), etc etc etc.

My only real Sparks are the Coudal feed and… um… I guess some of my Mac news feeds could go in there as they all replicate each other, but that means unless I dig into my Sparks list I’ll definitely miss unique news or features that aren’t being reported elsewhere.

I’m not heavily dissing it, just wondering what would be the difference between Fever, and a NetNewsWire that looks at all my feeds, works out which ones are talking about the same thing and bumps those topics into a ‘Hot’ category itself.

I want to make the most of it though so I would encourage anyone that has a better grip on it to give me some good Sparks and Kindling feeds to plug into it, in the tech, gaming, Apple and gadgety news realm, so I can see what it’s supposed to be doing for me!

Cheers!

Shaun’s a smart dude, I’m sure most of his decisions in Fever° are specifically going to scratch some itches that people didn’t even know they had. Problem is, these days, most people ditch just as soon as they feel even slightly lost.

Yeah, I can understand that inclination… but the $30 I spent makes me stick with it a while. And hey, what am I saying?!? I have no reason to want to bail.

I may be misunderstanding your request, but Fever° does in fact have drag-and-drop. No need to go into the Edit screen to move things around. He barely touches on it in the orientation video, but it’s in there.

First, make sure you’re in the 3-column view. Next, from whatever group you’re in (including Kindling), drag any feed from the center (feed-list) column, and drop it in any other group. To remove from the current group, you’ll notice that the Search bar is replaced by a “Remove From Group” drop-area. Each feed can be assigned to as many groups as you want, or none at all.

My only pain-point was customizing the list of Kindling. Figured it would be the same as Sparks, and I’d need to add stuff to it, rather than subtract. But I can totally see why he built it that way. Shaun’s a smart dude, I’m sure most of his decisions in Fever° are specifically going to scratch some itches that people didn’t even know they had. Problem is, these days, most people ditch just as soon as they feel even slightly lost.