Fancy RSS reader Lightread landed in Ubuntu Software Center

Lightread is a fancy RSS reader (offline read supported), presenting the user a good-looking Google Reader-based interface packed with visually pleasant minimalistic elements, basically, giving the news their right top importance with properly displayed and formatted text all over the app, while retaining key points (represented via monochrome icons) for easy configuration of available actions.

Lightread is mainly visually expressed through vertical columns: the left column houses the user's added feeds, categorized in All items, Unread and Starred, immediately followed by the actual added websites, the middle-column (where a preview of feeds is displayed, featuring websites' favicon, oranged time and full date), the right-column (where the actual reading experience is happening).

While the reading/managing/accessing activities are expressed via columns occupying almost the entire Lightread's space, the actual settings are available via the bottom bar, featuring:

• Refresh (that refreshes the feeds via a spinning animations)

  

• Add Feed (summoning a dialog where actual feed's addresses are to be entered)
• Toggle Star Status (clicking on it, automatically adds the clicked article to the left-column's Starred category)
• Toggle Read Status
• Settings allowing one to set the Refresh rate (Manual, 5 Minutes, 1 Hour, etc), keep the unread items, number of the kept items, etc
  

Locating a preferred article is to be performed via the handy search-as-you-type bottom's monochrome icon, search action cleared by pressing the Escape key.

Lightread renders articles via a gray-ish light background with black-ish text, basically, a pleasant-to-the-eye reading experience, furthermore, by clicking the bottom's I icon, the text is rendered via Instapaper Mobilizer, adding the option to "transform" the displayed text via predefined reading "experiences" (featuring the ability to select different fonts, background color, etc).

Discovering an interesting blog post, could trigger the necessity of fast for-later-use "archiving", demand easily satisfiable via the bottom arrow (clicking on it, summons a dialog where Send to Pocket and Send to Instapaper are to be used).

Integration into the desktop has been considered on Lightread's creation, integration noticeable via the count badge support (displays the number of unread articles), notification bubble (displaying the sync's completed action), enhanced Unity launcher quicklist (allowing user to 1-click away run Update News), proper HUD support.

Lightread 1.0 is available via Ubuntu Software Center.