In an effort to expand the amount of information I can read on my iPhone, I decided to investigate RSS readers for the iPhone. What gave me the push to do this was the limited number of iPhone friendly websites there are on the net. All the major news sites have iPhone friendly pages (FoxNews, CNN, NY Times, BBC). But that is really about it. And even on the 3G network, loading pages can be kinda slow.
A number of options were tried before NetNewsWire for the iPhone. The Google Reader has an iPhone interface, but is sucks. Safari has an RSS reader build it, but it isn't any better then the Google reader. Since I used to use NetNewsWire on my Mac before I switched to online readers and it is a wonderful application. The application has been bought by NewsGator, so information about NetNewsWire for the iPhone can be found here. Turns out the iPhone version is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes store.
The application is great. It has a very nice tabbed interface much like the UI for the iPod application. Each feed has a nice finger sized line for each feed title. When you click on the title, you get a nice list of story headers. Click on the header and you get the feed summary for that entry. The feed is rendered in a very readable manner, often much better than it would look on the web page. In addition, if the web site includes the full entry text in the feed, you can read the whole post right there in the reader. I should also mention that if only a link is included, NetNewsWire renders the page inside the reader. This seems to work pretty good. You can also choose to render the page in Safari if you wish.
You manage the feeds from the NewsGator web site. You have to register an account, but once you do, you can manager your feeds here. Once you add a few feeds, click the refresh button on the front page of NetNewsWire and magically, all your feed data is downloaded and available.
If you have a iPhone, check it out. Highly recommended.
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