I'm sure Shaun has thought about this but I think it would have worked really well as hosted solution with free and paid accounts. I'd be more than happy to pay $10 a month for Fever as I've been looking for a way to sort out RSS feeds in this way.

I agree. It's a surreal combination of front-end polish (I'm sort of amazed) and difficult multi-step DIY installation(wtf?). I'd buy a desktop version or subscribe to a hosted version right now, but I don't want to deal with all that crap if I'm paying someone for an application. (If it's open source like Wordpress or something, fine. I'll deal with settign up my own cron jobs and creating databases.)

I hope it does well though, so that it will be worth his time to develop a desktop platform or something I can just purchase from the Apple App Store. (Hopefully both.)

I feel kind of torn on this issue (and Fever in general). I was hoping this was going to be a hosted solution ($30/year) but the idea of hosting it myself also seems kind of cool. I'm just worried that my MediaTemple grid account won't be snappy enough. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? I know people had problems with Mint slowing their servers down. I'll still probably try this out though!

I was thinking long and hard about doing something similar to Fever this year (with the main feature being the granular updates I've mentioned below) but w/ Reader being absolutely free I really didn't think $5/month or $30/year had much of a chance. Plus, hosting all those feeds w/ a one-man shop would've really been a bear.

I think Shaun's $30/one-time cost + you deal with your own feeds is a really smart approach. Wish I'd have thought of it.

Shaun marketed Mint that way (same price point if I remember). It probably worked well enough for him to continue with that model.

I'm sure he also enjoys sleeping without having to worry about server downtime :-)

I've went ahead, bought and installed fever on my server. One problem: doesn't seem to parse Hacker News correctly!

I really wanted a Hacker News to act as a "spark" in fever, but it does nothing, always says there are "no items". This is extremely disappointing and my attempts to reach out to Shaun via email (on the feedafever.com site) and Titter have failed, and I have received no reply. :-(

Well, looks like Shaun can update fever from his end, and has version 1.0.1 has been pushed to my install of fever; in this update, Hacker News works!

"Fever caches and embeds the favicons of all the sites you follow into a single, compressed file so reading is fast and intuitive."

Ok, this tool is obviously targeted at a technical audience, but I don't know if this bit from the "features" section doesn't go a little to deep.

UI gripe: the temperatures are too big and awkward. I think the fever icon set at different colors (bright red for hot) might have worked better.

If he adds the ability to granularly control how often each feed is updated (1 hr, 24 hrs, 7 days, etc.) I'm sold.

does anyone here use feedly? i'm curious to see what a fever user thinks of it.

This product would be nice if it was free, and if it used the css trick to detect that I use Google Reader, and offered me one click to import my Reader preferences and see what the Fever system would recommend to me.

You've just offered what may be the ultimate gripe.

"It would be really nice if I didn't have to pay Shaun for the two (three?) years he spent developing. And also, it would be cool if it used a completely arbitrary and somewhat lame browser hack rather than using the feed import standard that every RSS program has used for years."

Do you think feed importing is new? Or that solutions don't exist that aren't complete gimmicks?

I was just trying to give honest feedback. This feature isn't so important to me that I would pay for it, but I would try it if it was free, and if I didn't have to run a program outside the browser. I respect Shaun's work and wish him well even if he does not want to provide products for users like me, which is a totally understandable decision.