Just Another iPhone Blog

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RSS Feeds have become a central way that many of us get our information and with applications such as Toodledo, Backpack and RememberTheMilk RSS is expanding its usefulness daily.

I have been using Google Reader for quite some time and pretty much swore by it… at least until last week. I recently started using the desktop RSS client NetNewsWire and love it.

NetNewsWire–

–has a familiar “Mail”-like appearance.

–integrates beautifully with the blog editing software MarsEdit

–makes “clipping” (saving) items a breeze

–is incredibly customizable

–includes a built-in browser that all but replaces your “main” browser.

–supports podcasts and automatically syncs audio files to iTunes

–integrates with Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Growl, Twitterrific and more

–includes Mac’s Microformat detection for contacts and calendar events

–enables smart lists to aggregate news from your feeds based on criteria

And the list goes on and on and on…

In short, NetNewsWire is incredibly powerful and takes RSS Reading to an entirely new level.

Best of all though–

NetNewsWire is fully integrated with NewsGator and the NewsGator iPhone interface is AWESOME!

First, let’s take a quick look at NetNewsWire.

For anyone who has ever used Mac’s Mail the interface is immediately familiar. It offers a number of different viewing options including—

A default “three-pane” view that takes a three-pane approach in which feeds are on the left, news items on the top right, and news content on the bottom.

A “wide-screen view” that places the articles to the right of the news list.

And a “combined view” that places titles and headlines together in the same pane and looks most like GoogleReader.

Thus-far I have been using the Widescreen view on my iMac and like it a lot.

Since getting an iPhone, however, a great deal of my RSS reading is done on my handheld rather than my computer. As a result, any RSS Reader that doesn’t have an easy yet powerful way to access feeds on the iPhone is worthless to me.

Fortunately NetNewsWire supports .Mac and FTP-based synchronization of subscriptions and the iPhone interface is not only beautiful (poor quality Casio pictures aside) but it is far easier to use than Google Reader.

The clean and easy to read main “Feeds” page shows each subscribed RSS feed and how many new items are available. It is small enough to show numerous feeds at a glance, yet finger friendly enough that I have yet to select the wrong feed.

Tapping a feed brings up the new items within that feed almost instantaneously.

The title of the feed is linked directly to the original item on the site.

A “More” link brings up the entire article in an iPhone-optimized format.

A “Read” link allows for easy marking of read articles.

An “Email” link instantly brings up a new email item with the article already linked to it.

The “Clip” link immediately adds the item to your accounts “clipped” articles for later use.

Finally the large “Page Read” link at the bottom of the page marks all items from that feed as “read” and immediately returns the reader to the main “Feeds” Page.
All in all it is fast, easy to use and easy to read.

In addition, while it takes a little work, it is possible to turn your clippings folder into its own RSS feed and create a direct link to them on your homepage. Now, all my RSS clippings are available at the touch of a button.

If you make use of RSS feeds it is certainly worth a look. Even the price is right— NetNewsWire and NewsGator are now free.

NetNewsWire can be found here and the mobile version can be accessed here.

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