xxxxx with the Twitter username you wish to get the RSS feed for:http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx (Where xxxxx is the username.)
Google has updated their Google RSS reader app to better support iOS devices. If you want to check it out, you can in your browser at this URL: Reader
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.
Well after using Weatherbug for about 1 week, I have had a change of heart. When you go to their Web page for a full forecast, they create pop under ads in your browser. Naughty, naughty. I simply don't use sites that do pop overs or pop unders. So Weatherbug is on my banned list.
I did find an alternative. Yahoo has a weather RSS feed service described at:
http://developer.yahoo.com/rss/
You just use the provided URL and a parameter for the Zip code and you are all set.
A quick tip I thought I should share with iPhone users out there. Although an iPhone can surf "real" web pages, in practice this can often be slow and frustrating. The problem seems to have more to do with Flash advertisements timing out than actual bandwidth issues with Wifi or the Edge network. Many web pages simply won't finish loading.
The solution, bookmark links to RSS and Atom URLs in Safari. That way, you can peruse the information, and pick only the stories you really want to read. The iPhone Safari browser has an RSS reader built in. It actually displays the stories in a very readable font and makes the scanning of stories very convenient.
You can actually manage the bookmarks using the Safari browser on the computer you are syncing your iPhone with. It took me a while to figure this out as it wasn't obvious to me that the bookmark syncing was taking place. But once you know that, it is very easy to surf the web with Safari on your Mac or PC and manage the bookmarks from there. Beats the heck out of trying to type on that tiny keyboard. It also makes the iPhone much faster and more useful while waiting in line at Starbucks.
