Just Another iPhone Blog

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Feeds - the native iPhone app for working with your Google Reader RSS feeds - has been updated, to Version 0.3.

Apparently this one was planned as purely a bug fix release, but a few new features made their way into it in the end as well.  The three main additions are a category view option (to see just items from a set category), options to adjust the font size and padding of table cells, and a link to the original article, so you can read it in full in the built-in browser.

I updated Feeds last night and it is definitely much more stable and usable than the previous version so far.  The new features are not earth-shaking, but they’re nice to see.  I’d like to see this app updated just a little more frequently - and would especially like to see some ‘action’ features that help you act on an individual item that is of major interest.  As in, I’d like to be able to mark an item as Starred and Share an item, just as I can in the desktop browser, and I’d also like to have an ‘email this item’ function as you see in many RSS reader apps.

It would also be nice to see some improvement on the syncing speed.  Today it took 8 minutes, over a WiFi connection, for a sync to complete for me.  I have 163 feeds, which is not a tiny number I suppose, but I know there are plenty of people out there with a whole lot more subscriptions than that.

Here is the full Change Log for Version 0.3 from the developer’s site:

    * Feeds now contains language files for Chinese (thanks to Jay Sun!) and German. If you would like to use the application in your native language and have the impression that you can do better than Babelfish at providing the necessary translations, please contact me.
    * Introduced the category view that allows you to filter your feeds by category and to hide items you’ve already read.
    * You can manually adjust the font size and padding of table cells to match the strength of your eyes and your fingers’ clumsiness. In the current version a restart is necessary for the changes to take full effect.
    * I added a link to the original article in the built-in entry browser. Neither does it look very elegant nor is it nice to navigate, but being an often requested feature, I added it nonetheless. Why do some people only aggregate summaries, anyway?
    * A lot of bug fixes: people who are subscribed to a vast number of blogs should no longer experience crashes upon synchronizing; canceled subscriptions don’t haunt you any longer; feeds with GET parameters in the URL work properly; …

This new version of Feeds is out now on Installer via the ModMyiFone source, which is part of Community Sources so you should just need to refresh sources as normal to see it. 

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