NetNewsWire

If you like to keep up with the news on your favorite sites without having to visit each and every one of them, RSS feeds are for you. If you have your iPhone with you often, having an RSS reader on your iPhone is probably one of the easiest ways to stay up to date. NetNewsWire is a free (the best kind!) RSS reader app for your iPhone and offers easy access to your feeds and useful features, though with a few drawbacks as well.



To start using NetNewsWire, you must first set up an account online at Newsgator.com, which is free. Once you've signed up, you can start adding your selected feeds to your account and choose other settings.



Once you have your online account set up, you enter your account log-in and password in the NetNewsWire settings screen in the Settings menu on your iPhone. Then once you open NetNewsWire on your iPhone, it will log in to your account and pull the latest updates on the feeds you entered online.



Given the well-known SDK restriction to not allow apps to run in the background, NetNewsWire only downloads updates when the app is open and running. It downloads updates fairly quickly and displays the number of unread items in a red badge on its icon on your home page when it's closed (and you can disable this in the settings menu if you'd like). When you're reading your feeds, you can click through to read the full article in a built-in browser, or choose to open it in Safari. There's also a handy button at the bottom of the view for each feed to Mark All As Read if that's how you clear out your feeds to know what you've read throughout the day.



One of the downsides of this app is that you can't add feeds in the app itself - you must do so online in your account or through a companion desktop application, though you can delete feeds directly on the iPhone. So, if you're browsing the web on your iPhone and come across a site with a feed you want to subscribe to, you won't be able to add it easily on the fly to view it in NetNewsWire. You can organize your feeds into folders on Newsgator.com and this file structure will sync to your iPhone as well.



Overall, NetNewsWire is a good RSS feed reader for the iPhone and works best if you don't mind going to NewsGator.com, or one of their companion desktop applications, to manage your feeds.

NetNewsWire is an RSS aggregator, which basically means you can get news clippings from any website that publishes RSS feeds. For example, news clippings at the Gizmodo's news site can be sent to your iPhone via your cellular connection or via WiFi. No SMS text messages are used. News topics available include business news, entertainment news, technology, weather, many personal blog sites, etc. You may have more than one source for your news and have them all available on the main NetNewsWire screen.

NetNewsWire's interface is simple, clean, and fast. The fonts are easy to read. I personally use this application multiple times a day to catch up on the latest information that interests me.

When reading news feeds from very active sites, you may have a long list of articles that you want to remove with minimum effort. NetNewsWire provides a button that allows you to mark the whole list (for one news feed) as read. This is a very handy feature. My only gripe about this is that once a news clipping is read, it "goes away" (removed from the list of unread articles). It is considered "read" when you've actually displayed the article, or when you explicitly marked them all as read. There is no apparent, easy way to access these read articles again. I would like to see a feature that allows one to mark an article as "unread", so that it can be read again later, or shown to a colleague or friend later.

When reading a news article, there are two options available for you. You may email a link to someone and/or you can add it to your list of favorite news clippings. Surprisingly, on the iPhone, you are unable to access your favorite clippings from this application. Your favorite clippings are only accessible from the main NewsGator web site via a web browser.

Overall, if you like short news updates from various web/blog sites, this is the best iPhone application for that. Can it be better? Yes, there is plenty of room for improvement.