Retickr Releases New Version, Continues Its Quest to Deliver News

Just last week, I wrote about Retickr, the news app that is focused on delivering news you want and eliminating the articles you just don’t care about (or well, noise). Sounds awesome, right? Well, good news — as promised, version 2.0 of Retickr was released on Wednesday. You can download the latest version in the Mac App Store.

So what’s new in Retickr 2? The latest release of Retickr is definitely a much more polished product. The new version was essentially re-built from the ground up. It fixes a lot of the bugginess and has a ton user interface enhancements. It also features a better content recommendation engine that will learn what you like and don’t like. Based on this information, using algorithms, Retickr wants to be able to curate news for you.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to make sure you never miss anything that would be interesting to you. I like the idea of that.

The application still sports all of the features from the previous version including, playlists, bookmarking, inline reading view, and social sharing integration (Twitter and Facebook).

Currently the only thing I’m noticing as a problem is that Retickr needs to invest in some new (or more) servers due to their growth lately. It takes a while for the app to login to the Retickr servers when opening and I’ve been consistently receiving server errors every few minutes (see screenshot below). Granted, the server errors have not impacted my usage too much, however, it’s noticeably slow when you click to open an article in the browser and it redirects you through their servers to the website (which I assume they to learn what you like to read in addition to clicking the “Like” or “Dislike” buttons).

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with Retickr 2.0 — I have it on my desktop more often than not. It has quickly become one of my favorite ways to read news and I’m very excited to see where the team takes it from here.