Alien Blue HD for the iPad

Since the recent Google Reader debacle with Recommended items, I’ve been moving back to Reddit for my crowd sourced news and top stories on the net. While trying to find a better way to consume Reddit, I ran across an amazing App called Alien Blue HD for the iPad. I like it so much, I think I may never go back to Google Reader even if it ends up getting fixed one day.

If you’re familiar with Reddit on the web, it is basically a pretty list of community submitted links that can be voted up or down. The most popular links end up at the top of the list…similar to Digg.

The issue with Reddit and Digg on the web is that you’ve got to click the links on that list and have your browser be re-directed to the page that contains the actual content…be that an article, picture, or whatever. Immediately you’ve lost the list and have to click back on your browser to get back to it (and hope the site will allow you to go back without popups or redirects). The other downside to a list of links is that many of them are just going to be teasers that take you to ads. It’d be nice to have a two-paned approach where you keep the list on the left and corresponding content on the right for each link. Kind of like the way message preview works in an email application like Sparrow Mail.

Well guess what! Alien Blue HD does just this for Reddit.com. It gives you a split pane where Reddit links are on the left and if you click on one the content is displayed on the right hand side. The left hand list is scrollable and any item you click will be previewed on the right. Simple. Addictive. Great.

Of course you also have the ability to vote any item up or down, email an item, comment on one or save it to your Reddit account.