Heaps Reader vs Global Sitrep

Heaps is an RSS and podcast reader for iPhone built around one idea: getting through your feeds should feel good. Organize your subscriptions into colorful collections called Heaps. Pick from 40 colors and custom icons to make each one yours. Then swipe through articles like a deck of cards — left to skip, right to save, up to mark as read. Or simply tap to read now. A progress bar shows how far you've got to go, haptic feedback keeps every gesture satisfying, and an undo stack means you'll never accidentally lose something. When you tap into an article, you choose how to read it. Reader mode strips away ads and trackers while giving you a clean, formatted experience. Browser mode loads the full site and keeps you logged in to paywalled publishers, so you don't re-enter credentials every visit. If you're short on time, article summaries powered by Apple Intelligence give you the gist in seconds. Podcasts live alongside your feeds, too!. Search, subscribe, adjust playback speed, queue up episodes, and download for offline listening — all without leaving the app. Oh, and Ben the Sheep lives in the app too! He's always there to show you around and cheer you on. Key features: Swipe-based card interface for fast article triage Reader mode for clean, distraction-free articles Browser mode with persistent logins for paywalled sites Article summaries powered by Apple Intelligence Podcast player with speed controls and offline downloads Save articles and clips to a personal library Mute words to hide topics you don't care about iCloud sync across devices with no accounts needed Background refresh so new articles are ready when you open the app Import and export via OPML Subscribe to RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds. Follow your favorite blogs, newspapers, and indie publishers. Keep your podcasts in the same place. Heaps makes all of it feel like one smooth workflow.

Global Sitrep puts the world's public monitoring feeds on a single map. Earthquakes from USGS. Disaster alerts from GDACS. Wildfire detections from NASA. Conflict events from UCDP and GDELT. Disease outbreaks from the WHO. Displacement figures from UNHCR. Shipping chokepoint traffic from the IMF. Live aircraft from the OpenSky Network. Each one is a public source, cited in the app, and shown for what it is. It works the moment you open it. No account, no sign-up, no subscription, and nothing is locked. Every panel, layer and source is included. THE MAP Forty-six layers over a native map: conflict zones, nuclear plants, data centres, strategic bases, submarine cables, pipelines, spaceports, chokepoints and more. Countries are shaded by an instability score that weighs conflict, unrest, hazards and coverage, not by how much data happens to exist for them. Tap any country for a briefing, any conflict zone for a dossier of what has happened there this week. LIVE FLIGHTS Aircraft positions over the area you are looking at, drawn as arrows along their ground track, with a trail of where each one has been while you were watching. Tap one for its altitude, speed, heading and aircraft type. Military aircraft are identified from public registration blocks and callsign conventions, and the app says how it knows and how confident it is. Needs a free OpenSky Network account. THE DASHBOARD Forty-three panels you can reorder, resize and hide: critical alerts, an activity timeline, regional instability rankings, seismic activity, storms, fire complexes, protests, cyber threats, market indices, commodities and prediction markets. Arrange it once and it stays that way. ALERTS AND REGIONS Set a detail level per kind of event, so you can keep every earthquake and only the major fires. Follow the countries you care about and be told when something critical happens there. Browse by region. See which sources are reporting, when each last updated, and which are quiet: an empty panel always says why it is empty. NEWS AND LIVE TV Nearly five hundred news feeds across dozens of categories, filtered to your language, plus a directory of fifty-six broadcast news channels, each of which opens in that broadcaster's own channel on YouTube. PRIVACY Global Sitrep collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind. Your filters and layout stay on your device. If you turn on the flights layer, the map area you are viewing is sent to the OpenSky Network to ask what is flying there, and the app tells you so on the screen where you enable it. OPTIONAL EXTRAS Thirteen of the twenty-four data sources need no setup at all. Nine more are unlocked by eight free accounts, and the app works fully without them: • NASA FIRMS - satellite fire detections, including over conflict regions • OpenSky Network - the live flights layer • Windy - webcams at map locations • abuse.ch - the botnet command-and-control feed • Copernicus - 10 m Sentinel-2 imagery on a pin • Global Fishing Watch - vessels that stopped transmitting AIS • Cloudflare Radar - internet outage detail • GIE - European gas storage Two sources need an institutional account this app cannot help you get, so they sit under Institutional access in Settings: ACLED, whose API is restricted to Research-level accounts, and ReliefWeb, which issues an app name by human review. Neither is the only route to what it carries. WHAT THIS IS NOT This is not a news alert service and not an emergency tool. Feeds are refreshed on the cadence their publishers actually update, which is minutes for earthquakes and days for some bulletins. Never rely on it for safety-critical decisions. For emergencies, follow your local authorities. There is an optional tip jar. It unlocks nothing, because the app is complete without it. Data from USGS, NASA, GDACS, UCDP, HDX, UNHCR, WHO, GDELT, IMF PortWatch, Open-Meteo, abuse.ch, the OpenSky Network and others. Full attribution is in the app.