Newsgator has released NetNewsWire 2.0 for the iPhone, which now syncs with Google Reader, just like its desktop coounterpart. It also sports a new icon, itself an improvement over the 1.0 version.
In truth, I was not a fan of the first incarnation of NNW for the iPhone. It was slow to sync, which made it virtually unusable for me. Until now, I’v been using Google Reader’s iPhone interface, which is quite nice.
But no longer. NNW 2.0 for iPhone is just about perfect for what I need. It syncs and loads quickly. You can email an article or post it to Instapaper, as one would expect. However, with emailing, you never leave NNW, which means no delay in returning to your feeds once the email is sent. (Ditto for Instapaper.)
You can also post to Twitter without ever leaving NNW, which is a tremendous feature for those of us who like to share articles we’re reading with the Twitterverse.
The final nicety in NNW 2.0 for iPhone is the ability to choose which feeds are shown directly from the reader interface. This could be done in NNW 1.0 for iPhone, but you had to log into your Newsgator account and choose which feeds you wanted and didn’t want to sync. That was, at best, inconvenient, even more so if you were constantly adding and deleting feeds.
Now if you want to limit which feeds sync with your iPhone, then it is as easy as pressing a checkmark next to the feed name under the Show/Hide Feeds tab at the bottom of your feeds list. (Certainly some will argue that this would be better placed in a preference pane somewhere, but I like the choice of putting it where it is. It means one less button on a tool bar or saving users from having to go into the iPhone’s main Settings.)
The only complaint I have is a user preference with the UI. You can star any article by pressing the star icon on the bottom bar. However, at first I couldn’t tell that it was working because I was at the bottom of the article and the only visual cue to know that an article has been starred is that a star appears next to the headline at the top of the article.
I would much prefer the functionality of Tweetie when marking a tweet as a favorite. In Tweetie, the star icon is just an outline. When you press it to mark a tweet as a favorite, the star fills in. If you press it again to remove it as a favorite, the star returns to an outline. Under this scenario, regardless of where you are in the article you are reading, you will know if it has been starred.
In addition, a couple of other things could be added to make it more appealing to some users:
- An All Items view
- Clipped items from NNW (In fairness, there is no way yet to sync Clippings from NNW on your desktop to Google Reader)
- Shared items view
I’ve not read a lot about NNW 2.0, which appeared in the app store just yesterday. LifeHacker loves it, but Just Another iPhone Blog is unhappy with the new look and feel. For my taste, I love the clean, simple look it offers.
NNW 2.0 lives on my home screen, and it is now the iPhone RSS reader I’ve always hoped to have.
You can get a free version (iTunes link) that displays ads from The Deck. Or you can shell out $1.99 and get the premium version (iTunes link) sans ads. I’m usually a free app kind of guy, but I paid the $1.99 because this version finally delivers what I want.
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