Posts tagged news
Did you hear a click?
3On a British news channel this lunchtime, I caught one of the most adorable technology videos I have ever seen. An elderly couple trying to take a still photo to email to friends on Frank’s 84th Birthday, on their new Mac. I just had to post it here.
They fully deserve to be Internet stars, with the video having gained over 612,000 views so far!
Read All About It: Newsstand app for iPhone
73 years ago
by Sam
in Applications
Since moving back to NewsFire RSS app on my iMac from the very flaky NetNewsWire, I haven’t been able to keep up to date with my RSS feeds on the iPhone. This largely hasn’t bothered me as I use my iMac more than the iPhone and even when I did have the syncing ability between NNW on my Macs and iPhone I never checked them.
Because I will be iPhone exclusive in a couple of weeks I suddenly remembered that I won’t be near my RSS feed on my Mac for a number of days. Being delivered the feeds I subscribe to on the iPhone during my Mac and wifi timeout will be one of the things I’ll look forward to as no doubt I’ll be beating a lot of boredom.
Last night I searched through the iTunes App Store for an app that would allow me to access my feeds by importing my OMPL file. Syncing wasn’t high up on my list, but something that performed well and looked good was.
Newsstand is arguably the most elegant RSS feed app in the App Store at this moment. Not only can you view and organize your feeds in portrait mode but flip your phone into landscape mode and this is where the app shows it’s true beauty, turning into a beautiful shelf of newspapers that you scroll through with a flick of your finger.
To open up a feed in shelf mode just tap the screen twice and it flips that feed open like a newspaper.
To add subscriptions to Newsstand you can import your subscription list from any Bloglines account, OPML file on the web or Google Reader. I imported my OPML file by uploading it to my webspace first. You can also add your OPML by uploading it to a free service such as opmlmanager.com You can also manually add new RSS feed URL’s at any time, aswell as share articles from Newsstand via E-mail, Twitter or delicious.com bookmarks. Be sure to check out the video here.
Newsstand is a beautiful app that is well worth the price at £2.99 [iTunes link] Newsstand will elegantly tide me over until NewsFire is available in iPhone app style with syncing abilities. I culled my RSS subscriptions list to around 22 recently, so when I’m back to my Mac I shouldn’t be too overwhelmed by unread feeds.
NewsFire
123 years ago
A year ago almost to the day I switched from NewsFire to NetNewsWire when the latter was released free of charge and came with a killer feature: syncing. I’ve been using NNW exclusively since then but experienced a few niggles that didn’t have me 100% sure this was up to the job.
Syncing across my Macs and iPhone with NNW wasn’t always a perfect art, but the worst was discovering recently that some of my favourite feeds weren’t being delivered, including that of a friends blog that I hadn’t received stories from since the end of last year. So, I blew the cobwebs off NewsFire and tried my friends feed in there. All of his 2009 posts turned up, whereas NNW just still didn’t want to know.
I was prepared to sacrifice syncing if it meant my feeds would be delivered to my main desktop app quickly and reliably, not hours, days or even weeks after they were published. I have now made NewsFire my default reader and have to admit it’s good to be back – I’ve always been impressed by it’s beautiful sleek UI. Syncing, while nice to have there as an option, is a feature I can live without given that I don’t follow any more than around 35 feeds currently.
After reading through the NewsFire developers blog this evening it looks like a little something-something is heading to the iPhone. Since his other iPhone app is so sleek looking I have high hopes for this. If the future NewsFire iPhone app includes syncing then I think I made the switch back just in time for (hopefully) some exciting things ahead.
What’s your chosen RSS reader on your Mac/PC/iPhone…?
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