The end is near, folks. Google Reader will officially shut down on July 1 whether you are ready for it or not. Thankfully, services like Feedly have stepped up to the plate to make sure that RSS addicts still have options when that day arrives. In a blog post this morning, Feedly announced that their replacement service, Feedly Cloud, is now available to everyone. With Feedly Cloud, the RSS replacement service now has an entire platform to make them completely independent of Google Reader, which is a good thing since we are days away from Google’s RSS service shutting down. 

With Google intending to kill off Google Reader by July of this year, people in my industry are freaking out a bit. You see, we all live and die with RSS feeds as we browse dozens throughout the day to help us create the stories that we bring to you. But we’re a small group, as the comments on this site and Twitter have helped us realize. RSS feeds are not as popular as they once were – if they were, Google wouldn’t be killing off their famed service. Many of you have turned to Twitter, Pulse, Flipboard, Google Currents, or a variety of other services.

Speaking of Currents, I retweeted a comment this afternoon from a reader who suggested Google kill it off instead of Reader. As someone who rarely looks at Currents unless it has received an update, I fully agree with this person, however, many of you were quick to point out that you enjoy the service and would rather stick a needle in your eye than use Reader.

So that brought me to today’s poll – how are you gathering your news throughout the day? News readers? News gatherers like Pulse? Social media?

Press, our favorite feed reader application on Android, received an update today to add extension support for the hottest app on the block right now, DashClock. This new extension will show you unread counts for articles, as long as you have it set to sync automatically in the background. Otherwise, it’ll just show a “0″ until you manually refresh it.

In order to use this new extension, you’ll need Press and DashClock. With both installed, add DashClock to one of your lockscreens, press the “Add Another Extension” button, and then choose “Press.”

If you are a big feed or Google reader user, you should really check out Press even with its $2.99 price tag.

Play Link $2.99)

Cheers Michael K!

Press, the feed reader Android application that has quickly become a favorite of the DL staff, received a sizable update this afternoon. While the original release of the app grabbed our attention, it was still missing some pretty basic features that other feed reader applications have had for some time. Simple things like background syncing and auto-sync on app launch are just a couple. Those are now included, along with a new way to quickly navigate between articles, more detailed sharing to social networks, and new text-alignment options. 

It has been a while since we last put together a “favorite” apps list, so today, we thought we’d do just that. Over the last few months, we have seen a number of incredibly well-designed apps pop up on Google Play, many of which that we haven’t had a chance to feature because of a wild holiday phone release schedule. So here are 10 of them that have stuck out or have become a mainstay in our list of daily-used apps.