Reviews written by eye-Fone

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.