app Archives - On The Edge!

Reeder is still my most used app on the iphone and I am delighted to see the new update from Silvio on friday. The iphone app got updated to version 3.1. The new update is really significant for users who were primarily using reeder to sync with google reader. We all know Google Reader is shutting down in July. Infact I made sure my reader is backed up with feedly just in case I am left with nothing to sync after july. I was always curious to see what silvio would do with reeder, given not many users would be keen on hosting their own feed sync server and it would be really dumb to just give up the app development because google stopped syncing.

This Reeder app update features an alternate sync support from Feedbin. Since feedbin is a $2 per month paid sync support, Reeder will also work as a standalone/local feed aggregator. So you can choose for paying to sync or you can continue to use Reeder as a stand alone app with no sync across device after Reader gets shutdown in July.

Though this update is not the perfect solution for the lack of free syncing of feeds, I must say this is definitely a step forward at least something is better than nothing. I purchased Fever and have fever server ready that I can use when google reader is no more,but not everybody is inclined to pay for Syncing. With 3 more months in hand, I still expect Silvio to look for a free sync service that can sync with Reeder or atleast come up with using icloud and make sure Reeder syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Ever since I moved to the self hosted blog, I have played around with measuring traffic on the site and i get to closely observe and learn about site analytics and web metrics. It has been over 6 months since I moved to godaddy in november i have had traffic stats enabled on my site and my goto analytics solution has been google analytics. I must say I have tried a lot of analytics solutions like statcounter, clicky, Piwik. I have always retained Google Analytics, Not just because its free but more so because it has a lot of tutorials and support communites to learn from.

Ever since I have turned analytics on, I always needed an app on the phone to check the stats from Google analytics when I am completely off for a few days without my machine. There are quite a long list of apps which are free and quite handy and basic. I ve tried a few may be 3 of them, and then I just bought the Analytics pro(App Store link, look at the screenshots) app. Its on the store for 6$ and i must agree its worth every penny of it. I like this app so much that i just prefer using the app more than the google analytics site itself.I used 3 free apps for their various features and now all three have been replaced by one app “Analytics Pro”.

So whats so special about the app you ask?

The single most reason why i would suggest you to buy this is that, you wont find a feature thats missing from the google analytics site. Well you can’t do everything on the app, but i must say that is the max any app would be allowed to do using the google’s api.

The app is slick, well thought out and neatly crafted.

I am sure after months of use that the app is very secure. It uses OAuth to connect to your google account. Which i think is quite safe. Though i dont have a proof to substantiate, I can definietly acknowledge that nothing has broken with my google account since i started used the app.

It supports multiple sites if you have them linked on the same google account or with multiple google accounts.

You can do a tonne of customization and choose from past 7/14/21/28 days along with a look at today and yesterday. You can choose your own time frame as well if you need and choose to have a 7 day running average on the graphs and so on.

Content and Traffic Source drill down is phenomenal.You should just try it, Its so damn detailed, that hardly would you notice that you are on the app and not on the website.

Most importantly if you have goals set on Google Analytics site, you can track them on the app in your choice of currency from the 25 supported which is really cool. The app does display e-commerce tracking if your site has been configured for.I have no idea how the e-commerce tracking works though, since i don’t have an e-commerce site

If you are looking for a whole list of features please read them here.

While I bought the app purely based on the screen shots on the app store, I haven’t been disappointed at all. There may be a lot of apps for Google Analytics on the app store but this has been the best of the lot of what I tried.All my needs of tracking my site on the phone using Google is being taken care by Analytics pro. My Go to app for tracking. I use it daily and I would recommend it to you as well.