Reviews written by Marianne Schultz

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.

A very useful feature that Apple enabled with its iPod line was the ability to use the player as a portable hard drive, allowing you to save files to it that could be retrieved from another computer. Apple did not enable the iPhone to do this, and short of jailbreaking your iPhone (and voiding its warranty!), there hasn't been an authorized way to do this until software developers created apps for this specific purpose. FileMagnet is one such app, though it is just for the Macintosh and is not PC-compatible.



To use FileMagnet, you need two components - the app loaded on your iPhone AND a companion application for your Macintosh (this desktop companion application is free). All of the file transferring is done via wifi, so your Mac must have wifi as well. The instructions included in the app on your iPhone explain well what you need to do to load documents on to it. Essentially, your iPhone and your Mac must be on the same wifi network, and the respective FileMagnet apps will "see" each other and connect, and any files you have selected on your Mac for transfer will be sent to your iPhone automatically.



You can view a number of different file types on your iPhone - at the time of this review, Microsoft Office, iWork, and PDF documents can be viewed, as well as images, movies, and sounds. Note that FileMagnet does not provide the ability to edit these files, only to view them.



FileMagnet does not restrict you to sending and receiving files with just one Mac. You can transfer files between your iPhone and any Mac you have as long as you install the desktop companion application on that Mac. This can be very handy if you simply want to transport files between your home Mac and your work Mac.



If you have a Mac and want the option to easily transfer files to your iPhone to carry with you for reference or later reading, this app will work for you. At the time of this review, there are other file transfer apps available on the App Store. Some offer more functionality and/or don't require a companion app for your computer in order to transfer files. Of course, you should research them to find what's best for you, but know that FileMagnet is a good choice app overall and does what it's meant to do just fine, and will be particularly useful if you have multiple Macs and want to use your iPhone to shuttle files between them.

I have a GrandCentral phone number that I use quite a bit - I prefer to give this number out to most people instead of my cell or home numbers. Up until now, it's strictly been for receiving calls, and I've had to block outgoing calls on my cell phone with the *67 code if I don't want the person I'm calling to know my number. But now, GrandDialer makes it possible for you to use your GrandCentral number to make calls from your iPhone so that number appears in the Caller ID display of the person you're calling. Brilliant!

The main view when you open the app is a dial pad, just like the one you see in the iPhone's built-in phone application, though this one has a green cast to it. Flanking the Call button at the bottom is a Settings button on the left and a delete button on the right. At the bottom, you can toggle easily between the dial pad and your full Contacts list - very handy!

Set-up is fairly easy, but there is one area that could use some clarification. When you go to Settings, you enter your GrandCentral user name and password, and then enter phone numbers. What you need to enter here is your iPhone's phone number (and any other numbers you want to be able to use, like your home number), NOT your GrandCentral number. If there was just one sentence explaining this in the section where you fill in these numbers, I think it would prevent a lot of confusion.

GrandDialer does not actually make the phone call from your iPhone and then somehow mask the call. It routes your call request through GrandCentral's servers, and when the call is connected, your iPhone will ring. When you pick up, you'll hear the line ringing just as if you'd dialed the call from your iPhone directly. I've used this only where I've had very good signal strength so far, and it goes very quickly through the process of logging in to your GrandCentral account and sending the dial request to the point where your iPhone rings, in 10 to 15 seconds, if that.

If you have a GrandCentral account and you've been looking for a way to be able to use it for outgoing calls, this is the perfect app for you. And, it's free! How much better could it get?

Ever find yourself in a noisy and crowded place where you couldn't yell loud enough to be heard? Or do you work in a quiet environment but want to communicate with co-workers on the sly without talking? While not an essential app that you'll rely on daily, Shout It can be helpful in these situations or just good for some laughs.

Shout It essentially turns your iPhone into a small message board that you can customize to display whatever text you want. Your text scrolls across the screen in a white font (it looks like Arial to me) on a black background. The first version of this app was a bit problematic since it truncated longer messages, but an updated version has been released that eliminates this issue.

I got this app purely for fun, and am not expecting it to be extremely useful on a regular basis. I've shown messages to my co-workers when it wasn't prudent to say what I was thinking out loud, and expect to use it with friends in crowded bars to communicate a drink request or to ask someone to save me a seat. I imagine it could have more interesting uses for single iPhone owners out there who want to ask for the number of the cutie in the car next to them, or say something witty to someone across a crowded room.

You can prepare and save messages you plan to use easily ; creating and editing them can be done in portrait or landscape mode. When a message is activated, it scrolls in landscape orientation only. I've saved messages like "Save me a seat, please!" and "Text me later" for future use.

The app costs $3.99, so I think it?s a little steep for what you get (there is a similar app available in the App Store that does essentially the same thing and is free). It does look nice, but even adding more customization in the future (changing fonts, colors, scrolling speed, etc.) might not make it worth the $3.99 to many.

Like to read? Want to be able to carry around multiple books on your iPhone with you everywhere? Want to have access to your entire eReader library on the go? If any of these apply, eReader would be a good app for you.

If you are just getting into ebooks, you should know that there are various ebook retailers out there, and many of them have their own Digital Rights Management (DRM) standard (in the same way that some songs purchased through iTunes have limitations on how they can be shared and what players they work on). eReader does have its own DRM standard that is not compatible with other ebook readers. The bottom line is that you should choose an ebook reader and ebook store and "stick" with it since the ebooks you purchase will most likely only work on the reader provided by that company. eReader provides reader software for a number of platforms, so you can view your purchased books on a Mac, PC,

With that said, I have been purchasing eReader ebooks for several years and have a large existing library of ebooks purchased from them. You cannot purchase new ebooks directly through the iPhone app, but you can access your ENTIRE eReader ebook library through your iPhone. To buy a new book, you log into eReader's site and make your purchase (you can even do this through Safari on your iPhone ; no need to get to your computer), then to access it on your iPhone, you follow the straightforward prompts to log in to your account within the eReader app and download the new book from your online library. The book is then saved to your iPhone and is accessible anytime, even when you cannot connect to the internet via 3G, EDGE, or wifi. This is one of the best features in my view, since it means you can read a book even when you're on a plane and can't use wifi or the cellular radio.

Note that eReader is part of Fictionwise, and your Fictionwise ebook library can also be accessed through this app.

While reading, there are some user-selectable options to customize the screen to your liking. With a book open, you can simply tap once on the screen to bring up an icon menu across the bottom. From here, you can choose between 3 fonts (Georgia, Helvetica, and Marker Felt) and 4 font sizes, go to the book's table of contents, or search the book's text for a specific word or phrase. It automatically remembers the last page you viewed in a book and goes back to it when you re-open the application later.

The application can use the iPhone's accelerometer to detect when you've changed the orientation of the iPhone to landscape mode and re-orient the book you're reading. Changing pages is as simply as flicking your finger forward or backward to advance or go back.

I have not tried this yet, but you can also load a dictionary from your online library onto your iPhone, and then you can tap and hold on a word in a book to view its definition in that dictionary.

There are a few things that the app doesn't have (yet) that I'd like to see, you can't choose to bookmark a page so you can browse another part of the book and go back immediately to your desired page. I'd also love to see direct access to the Brightness setting for the iPhone so you don't have to exit the app to adjust the brightness down or up. And there's no way to go to a specific page in the book, you can only get to chapters listed in the table of contents. At the time of this review, eReader has stated on their site that they plan on further updates to the app, but this version is a great start in my opinion!