Newsstand RSS Reader for iPhone
With several Twitter apps on my iPhone I’ve found that lately I’m on top of tweets but not reading blogs any more. I find that I have down time in my day to catch up on reading but not necessarily when I’m in front of a computer. So I thought I’d check out the RSS reader options for the iPhone.
When I’m on my computer, bloglines is my preferred newsreader. Unfortunately I am not a fan of their mobile site and they don’t have an iPhone app, which is too bad as I’d buy it.
Google Reader also has a mobile site which is better than bloglines but still not what I was looking for. So I decided to browse the app store.
There are a number of RSS reader apps available. Which one is the best? I don’t know but after a bit of browsing I bought Newsstand for $5.
So far I like it. It was able to import all my subscriptions from bloglines and honors my groups. I wish it would do two way status syncing, but that is not supported. Oh well.
The Newsstand UI has a cool feature where when you turn the iPhone sideways, it displays all the blogs as magazines and newspapers on a shelf. It looks similar to how albums are displayed with Coverflow. Unfortunately the scrolling animation is a bit slow. Probably because I am subscribed to a lot of blogs.
The coverflow interface is really slick but it needs a few improvements to make it truly great. First, there is a small tag displayed at the beginning of groups. This is nice, but it would be even better to be able to tap that tag to scroll to the next group.
The second improvement that I would highly suggest would be the ability to filter the coverflow view to show only those blogs with new content. It does display a red stripe across the cover of blogs with unread content but it’s not that useful when scrolling through hundreds of subscriptions. Also, limiting the view to unread content would no doubt speed up the scrolling animation.
The solution may be for me to edit and pare down my subscriptions. I probably don’t need to subscribe to the whole kitchen sink on a mobile device. But on the other hand, if they made the improvements above there wouldn’t be a reason not to. Having so many subscriptions does make the refreshing process a bit long, but I don’t suppose there’s a good way around that.
More thoughts to come after I use the app for a while. I’m interested to see if my blog reading goes up. I hope so; I feel out of the loop.