Skip to content
All docs

Introduction

Introduction

What Cardmaniacs is

Cardmaniacs is a native Apple reading desk. It brings feeds, read-later, bookmarks, highlights, and imported documents into one calm command center—designed for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with the same editorial restraint you expect from a first-party Apple app.

If your reading life is scattered across a feed reader, a save-for-later service, browser bookmarks, PDFs in Files, and highlights trapped in Safari, Cardmaniacs offers a single surface to triage, read, annotate, and return to what matters.

Who it is for

Cardmaniacs serves curious readers who want a better home for articles and long-form content—not only power users who already live in RSS. The app stays approachable on first launch while exposing depth for people who want keyboard shortcuts, smart lists, and fine-grained reading controls.

You might use Cardmaniacs if you:

  • Follow blogs, newsletters, YouTube channels, or podcasts through RSS and Atom
  • Save articles to read later without losing them in a browser tab graveyard
  • Keep reference bookmarks separate from your reading queue
  • Import PDFs, EPUBs, or Markdown files for focused reading
  • Want highlights and tags that travel with your library across devices

The four pillars

Cardmaniacs organizes your library around four complementary areas. They share the same card model, reader, and tagging system—but each answers a different job.

Feeds

Subscribe to RSS and Atom sources, discover feeds from URLs, and triage incoming articles. Feeds are for incoming content: new posts land here, you skim, star, archive, or send items to Read Later.

Read Later

Your intentional reading queue. Save articles, videos, and documents you plan to finish. Collections like In Progress, Highlights, PDFs, and Books help you filter without creating duplicate copies of content.

Bookmarks

Long-term reference links—documentation, recipes, tools, pages you revisit. Bookmarks are not the same as Read Later: they are for keeping, not for working through a queue.

Cards (and documents)

Everything in Cardmaniacs is a card: a unified item with title, source, read state, tags, and optional reader content. Imported PDFs, EPUBs, and Markdown files become cards too, with metadata synced through iCloud while file bytes may stay local depending on type and settings.

Sync and privacy

Cardmaniacs syncs your library through iCloud (iCloud.com.cardmaniacs.app). Your feeds, read-later queue, bookmarks, highlights, tags, and reading progress stay consistent across Mac, iPhone, and iPad when you are signed into the same Apple ID.

Reading happens on-device. Apple Intelligence features (summaries, entity extraction, digest) use on-device models where available and require supported hardware and OS versions.

How this documentation is organized

  • Introduction — mental model and core vocabulary
  • Getting Started — download, first ten minutes, layouts and navigation
  • Guides — deep dives on feeds, queues, documents, highlights, home, reading tools, and integrations
  • Reference — keyboard shortcuts from the app command catalog and settings panes

Next steps