Covered regularly over the years, Readit is a top Reddit client and the alternatives I’ve tried so far come nowhere near. So I thought it was time, five months on from the last mention, to round up the updates and fixes since v2.0 appeared, not least that the previously commercial application is now totally free, though with an in-app way to remove ads from appearing.

Back in the day(!) we had Compuserve and (in the UK) CIX, dial-up, mainly text-based conferencing systems where you can topics on everything under the sun. Then the Internet happened and conferencing got a bit lost for a while, split across a million different sites and forums. But ‘reddit’ has been emerging over the last decade as the natural successor to CIX et al, with massive popularity among those who prize content over glamour.

Readit is now up to v2.1.8.0, here’s a summarised changelog of everything added since our last story:

• App is now free and ad-supported. No more trial limitations.
• Added a new mobilizer for article viewing that respects theme
• Improved speed for swipe view
• Improved speed for both opening and closing a post
• Increased performance of image context menu to make it faster and easier to use
• Added support for the new slashtags such as u/calebkeith and r/readit
• Post entry animation is 3 times faster now when going directly to comments and doesn’t open then play the comment animation, it opens immediately to comments now.
• All fonts are now of the Segoe family and all of the UI has been updated to fit this font.
• Post template has changed, smaller thumbnails are now used with a more compact view for both people with and without preview images.
• Preview Images for GIFs
• Default subreddits are now loaded based on the new API call by reddit when you are not logged in (instead of the top 50 subs)
• Removed the old expander button for image previews. Press and hold on the thumbnail to preview it now.
• Full light theme support (minus the subreddits list until we can figure out how to keep contrast there). All dialogs, etc are optimized back to light theme when it is selected as the app’s theme
• Preview images are now enabled by default for low memory devices
• Default youtube video quality is set to 720p on new installs/settings resets
• Post search filtering added – sort by relevance, comment count, hot, new, top, etc. Filter by time as well as sort, such as year, hour, month, day, etc. Restrict to current subreddit checkbox as well.
• A New Post entry/exit parallax effect has been added.
• A MOUNTAIN of bug fixes

Very slick indeed, this is my default way to access Reddit on the move, etc.

You can grab Readit here in the Store. Anyone who’d previously bought Reddit (at a dollar or so) can remove the ads, of course, for free.