NetNewsWire for iPod touch and iPhone 3G

NetNewsWire for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch is a free native application based on the award winning RSS feed reader for Mac. NetNewsWire for iPod Touch (iPhone 3G) provides you with a lightweight, easy application for keeping up with feeds on the go and it syncs with NewsGator’s suite of RSS readers, including NetNewsWire for Macintosh, FeedDemon, Inbox, and NewsGator Online. RSS is the fastest and most efficient way to read your favorite news and with NetNewsWire for iPhone you can access feeds wherever you are.

The product features are:
-Access to RSS feeds from your iPhone 3G or iPod Touch.
-iPhone-native user interface.
-Synchronization with NewsGator’s suite of RSS readers, including NetNewsWire for Macintosh, FeedDemon, Inbox, and NewsGator Online.
-Centralized access to your feed list along with an indicator of how many unread news items are associated with each feed.
-Simple view of the titles of each unread news item for faster and easier skimming of content.
-User-friendly news item viewing pane that provides the item’s title, publisher, publish date, author and post.
-One-click access to view news items in Safari.
-"Next Unread" button, which goes from story to story with a quick tap of a single button.
-Clipping capabilities for saving items for later viewing or syncing with the desktop and browser-based RSS readers.

















Once you’ve configured your feeds, launching NetNewsWire on the iPhone 3G displays a list of those feeds, along with the number of unread articles in each feed. (The current version of NetNewsWire for iPhone, 1.0.7, shows only feeds with unread articles; earlier versions showed all feeds. A setting to choose your preferred approach would be a nice addition.)

In the screenshot here, you can see that some feeds are grouped under headings; if you have feeds organized in folders on the Mac version of NetNewsWire, as I do, such groupings are synced to the iPhone version.

If you’re online—via either WiFi or a mobile network—the program will connect to the Internet to check for new articles and to sync the status (read/unread) of articles. You can see the total number of unread articles at the bottom-left of the screen, as well as on the app's icon on your iPhone's Home screen. This check/sync process happens each time you launch NetNewsWire, as long as the previous check/sync occurred more than five minutes before.

Tap on a feed to view a list of articles in that feed, sorted by date with newest articles at the top; unread articles are displayed with blue type, read articles with gray. Tap an article title to view the article summary and any information about the article provided by the feed. (One limitation here: if an article summary includes an image, NetNewsWire doesn't scale the image down to fit the screen; you must manually scroll around to see all of the image.)

You can quickly move to the next unread article summary by tapping the Next Unread button. Alternatively, if you want to view the full article, tap on its title on the summary screen. Unlike many other iPhone apps, NetNewsWire doesn’t use Safari to view a Web page; it provides its own Web-browser screen, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between NetNewsWire and Safari. However, while this screen lets you double-tap or “unpinch” to zoom in on a Web page, it doesn’t support rotation, so you can't view pages in landscape mode.

Posted in: iPod-Touch-Apps