Poor on useful features

It looks like the developers bet the ranch on this "creaminess" concept, and if that is working for you, consider my rating a three or four star. But that feature (which I have no interest in, but thats just me), even if it works, comes at a significant cost. Consider the comparison to Headline, a long-available app of similar nature, that Cream in fact helpfully offers to import feeds from (it succeeds partially at that). Below are things (most of which you can do in Headline circa 2008) and which you would expect to work in any such quick reader, but do not:

* Menubar icon
* Preference setting for font and font size
* Navigation in the Stories list using keyboard or trackpad gestures
* Autorefresh with user preference for frequency, and notification of new articles

Cream is a well crafted app and a promising one. Add a menubar with visual indicator of new items (or better, autopop), keyboard navigation (or better, gesture based navigation), and configurability for font (especially size), and it would be compelling.

Update on 1.1: this update gives hope that the developers are not only listening but also busy working to add featuers. Keyboard navigation was much needed and is welcome. At the cost of sounding churlish, I will point out that it is imperfect: navigating to a new article with the keyboard causes the article popup to disappear, which means you need two keystrokes (one arrow up or down to move to the next article, and one right arrow to pop the message window out again). There is still a good bit missing, in my book, as listed in the bullet list above. But there seems to be hope on the horizon.

Ravi Sarma about Cream