I’ve been an avid iPad user for 30 months and counting. I still love and use my Pad a lot, but I also bought a new Surface RT. Will my Surface ever completely replace my iPad? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out. This blog series is aimed at comparing the two devices in all sorts of situations, from work to home, and analyzing the pros and cons of each. You can read other entries in the series using the links below.

• From iPad to Surface – Day 1: Acquisition & Setup
• From iPad to Surface – Day 2: Sandy Killed my Power
• From iPad to Surface – Day 3: Under the Hood
• From iPad to Surface – Day 4: Shopping for Apps
• Bonus Post: You Want to Buy a Surface, but What is Windows RT?
• Bonus Post: Developing Apps for Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8
• Bonus Page: Infragistics NetAdvantage for Windows UI – Developer Controls for Windows 8 & Windows RT

What are Favorite Fridays?

What makes or break any smartphone or tablet is the selection of available apps. This is where the iPad truly shines, and this is also why I have absolutely no use for my Blackberry Playbook. You know you’re in trouble when there are no recognizable brands in your top 50 free apps. Surface doesn’t have that problem. There are lots of known apps & brands in the Windows Store. Some are good, some are bad, some are works in progress, and everyone has their favorites.

I decided it be cool to look at my favorite apps on the Surface and share my experiences with them every Friday.

Today’s Inspiration: Flipboard

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, or if you’ve read the first few installments of this series, you know by now that my favorite mobile app of all time, across all devices known to man, is Flipboard. Thank you to Jason Beres for introducing me to Flipboard when I started working at Infragistics.

Flipboard is the best News Reader client and fully supports Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instapaper and also easily shares with other apps. It creates a beautiful magazine layout of all my feeds, uses natural gestures to navigate the stories, and it’s a pure pleasure to use. When you’re a news junkie like I am, both for personal and professional reasons, you need an easier way to quickly stay on top of thousands of news stories every week.

This is Flipboard on the iPad:

Flipboard was an iOS exclusive for a long time. It works on iPhone but is best used on an iPad. Flipboard started appearing on some Android phones through some exclusive agreements, but it’s still not a widely available Android app on the Google Play Store.

I looked for a Flipboard equivalent on Windows Phone for over 6 months. I’m also looking for a Flipboard equivalent in the Windows Store. I tried Zentomi, Feed Reader, FeedPoint, and Modern Reader. I don’t like any of them. In the end, my answer to a Flipboard replacement is the same on Surface as it was on Windows Phone: Nextgen Reader.

Today’s Friday Favorite: Nextgen Reader

Nextgen Reader is, in my opinion, the best Google Reader client on Windows RT, and also on Windows Phone (to date). I’m talking about the Windows Store version here, as I’ve experienced it on my Surface. Unlike Flipboard, Nextgen Reader does not include “official” news sources, nor does it allow you to turn your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feed into a magazine-style layout. Nextgen Reader is fed 100% by your Google Reader account.

Nextgen Reader is $3.99 on the Windows Store, and there is also an unlimited ad-free trial. Sure, there are free alternatives, but they are not even worth the download time. Just skip them and try NGreader. To be honest, I have no idea how “limited” is the trial because it seems full-featured and has no ads, but I bought it anyways just to support the devs.

Nextgen Reader, or NGreader for short, provides a classic “desktop” style RSS reader view with 3-column layout as seen below:

NGreader also provides a “Microsoft Design” (i.e. Metro-style) layout, called Modern View. You switch to the Modern View by tapping the app logo (not super obvious). I like that it allows you to sift though all your RSS posts chronologically. I don’t like how other RSS clients force you to look at all the posts in one feed at a time. This reading style allows me to gloss over Windows Phone, World of Warcraft, Microsoft, Business, MMO, Star Trek, Apple, Xbox, Politics, XNA, and Canadian news, all intermixed together, just like in Flipboard.

The navigation is simple. I can simply use gestures to go through various posts. If I want to dig inside a specific folder in my Google Reader setup, I can do so. I can jump to a specific feed as well. It’s very flexible and natural.

I can tap on any article when I want to read more. Even in this view I can swipe left to move on to the next article. I love that. NGreader uses Readability by default to simplify the article view and strip out menus, ads and such. Instapaper is also supported to “mobilize” articles. You can even manage the default “open article” method by feed. If a feed is known for offering disappointingly short RSS summaries (*cough* CNET *cough*), you can tell NGreader to show you the “mobilized” version of the article instead.

If you swipe from the bottom, you also get additional options like forcing a sync, marking everything as read, filtering a feed, pinning a feed to start, copying the article link to the clipboard and mobilizing the view.

Sharing Content

Sharing content is an important part of news reading. I often tweet from Flipboard as I find interesting articles I want to share, or I email links to my Buffer account so they get tweeted later. Sharing content in NGreader is done via the Share charm, which means that you can only share with other apps that support sharing, such as:

• People: To share via Facebook or Twitter. The problem is it only shares the link and fails to add the title of the article to the message. This is bad.
• You can share via other apps already installed. For example, I can share on Twitter via MetroTwit since I already installed it, and this method actually includes the title of the article too. This is good. Rowi and Tweetro also support the Share Charm.
• Mail: To share via email, which includes the title and the link, and even an image if any was included in the article.
• OneNote: This one showed up in my Share list, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’m getting some error about sharing to the current section because it wasn’t synced.

It’ll be interesting to see more apps show up in the Share charm here. Instapaper is the big omission for me. There is no Instapaper app on Windows Phone, but NGreader has built-in support for Instapaper in its Windows Phone version. NGreader on Windows Store sorely needs this feature since there is no Instapaper app in the Windows Store either.

Configuration Options

NGreader also supports various configuration options via the Settings charm, such as when to mark articles as read, disabling the “mark all read” feature.

The Settings charm also exposes Sync options, such as whether or not to sync upon start, changing the sort order, and controlling how many articles to sync & keep in the whole reading list, in starred items, per feed and within a folder. You can also control the number of items to download per feed.

Other Cool Features

I didn’t get a chance to talk about all the cool features in Nextgen Reader. Here are a few more:

• Offline Support: NGreader caches articles and images that were already downloaded so you can read later when offline, like on a plane, or during a hurricane.
• Completely safe Oauth2 Authentication to your Google Reader account.
• Mark all items as read with a single click.
• Pin multiple tiles to the Start screen.
• Full keyboard support in Classic View with lots of built-in keyboard shortcuts.
• Incremental sync engine.
• Limit number of items to download per feed.

Things to Improve

Nextgen Reader is awesome, but it’s not perfect. Here are some improvements I’d like to see added in future updates:

• I wished sharing worked like the Windows Phone version where I can simply tweet from the app. Going through the People Sharing feature is a nice level of integration but requires too many taps.
• There is no support for Live Tiles yet, but the developers said it was coming.
• More upcoming features that are currently missing: snapped view and portrait orientation.
• In Modern View, the Back arrow in the top left corner allows you to go back to the Classic view. I often find myself tapping that by mistake to go back in my navigation.
• The scrolling performance suffers in the list of feeds in both Desktop and Modern Views. Performance also needs some improvements to reduce stutters when navigating during a sync.
• I need to be able to send a link to a built-in Instapaper feature.

I also wish NGreader offered some of the features I get in Flipboard:

• Magazine-layout view.
• Support for other news sources like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Partner with official news sources and publications to feature their content in the app.

Day 5 Summary

I’m not done exploring NGreader. To be honest, I only discovered and bought it today, but it’s already my favorite Surface app. Being able to quickly read news is the #1 use I have for a tablet. It remains to be seen if Nextgen Reader will truly replace my Flipboard on iPad, but so far things are looking good. This app should take me 90% there in terms of news reading.

If you have any questions about Surface, including suggestions for future topics to explore in this series, questions about my experiences with the Surface vs. iPad, or any other tablet, feel free to ask them in the comments section below, or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the right tools for you with the new NetAdvantage for Windows UI. You should also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Do you have a favorite Windows Store app so far? Let me know.

See you tomorrow!