Here at Windows Phone Central, some apps just sit clear above the rest as our favorites. When it comes to gathering your favorite news sources and reading them in an efficient fashion, we do not go farther than NextMatter’s Nextgen Reader.

The popular RSS reading app for Windows 8 has received an update today and a plethora of new features and abilities have been introduced.

For those who are unaware, Nextgen Reader is an RSS reading application (powered by Feedly) that is available for both Windows Phone and Windows 8. The application is not free, but we guarantee that if you are a news hound, your few bucks will not go wasted. I personally use Nextgen Reader here at Windows Phone Central to stay on top of the latest press releases and news – I find it that reliable.

To start off the list of today’s updates, we begin with the newly integrated Smart Search ability. The new integration into Nextgen Reader allows users with a Feedly Pro subscription to search their articles. Feedly Pro is a subscription that is available for $5 a month or $45 a year and gives access to article search, Pocket integration, Evernote integration, OneNote integration, and premium support.

For the majority of us that do not have Feedly Pro, you shouldn't be worried as this Nextgen Reader update still packs improvements for the rest of us. You can now easily show/hide read items and feeds without having to dig through menus. You also gain the ability to right-click on a specific feed or article and receive new context menus (Yay for mouse and keyboard support).

Talking about keyboard support, the update also introduces two new shortcuts to quickly get things done. Users can hit the “Y” key to show/hide read items and the “Z” key to quickly focus on a specific section of the application.

Several bug fixes have also been included, along with performance enhancements. If you have been having an issue with logging in or syncing during first time setup – that issue has also been resolved.

As we all know, Nextgen Reader is not just available on Windows 8, it is also available on Windows Phone. Last week the app got updated and slipped by us, but the biggest new feature was the ability to share content with your OneNote notebooks.

In addition to the new feature added, standard bug fixes and performance improvements have also been applied to the Windows Phone variation. If you were previously having trouble when posting to Twitter, that issue has been remedied and you should be all ready to go once again!

Click here to download the latest version of Nextgen Reader (trial version/$2.99) for Windows 8. If you are interested in Nextgen Reader for Windows Phone (trial version/$1.99), you can click here to download it or scan the QR Code below.

Do you use Nextgen Reader to keep up with the latest news and your favorite RSS feeds – if not, what are you using to get the job done?