See whether an item is downloaded or not from list view.Skip automatic downloading upon startup to save bandwidth and the battery.Mark news items as unread after looking at them.List items in folders and individual feeds.Phantom Fish got the big things right, but there are tons of little things that need improvement if the company wants to stick to this price point. However, the download capability and the very clean, minimalist user interface design (see the website, which has a nice video) make Byline almost worth the price of admission. In that regard, $10 is a fairly hefty price. This is probably not a reasonable expectation, but somehow, I expect applications for a small device to carry a small price tag. Byline will even download new pages in the background while you're perusing ones downloaded previously-this will give your battery a workout it won't soon forget, though. Displaying previously-downloaded pages takes between one and five seconds, depending on the page's complexity and the mood the iPhone happens to be in.īeing able to predownload pages in RSS feeds and then quickly display them locally is a truly great feature: there are still many places where connectivity can't be had, and it's always much faster than waiting for the same page to load "live" from the network. The arrows allow for quick navigation without having to go back to the list of starred items. This is, of course, synced with Google Reader as soon as Byline can connect to Google. Tapping the star unstars/restars the item. The page looks exactly like it would in Safari, except that there is no tool bar at the bottom and the URL bar is replaced by something very different: a bar with a star and previous/next arrows. Tapping on the item in the list immediately loads the original web page-however, not in Safari, but in Byline itself. However, things are different for the "starred" category. Despite the fact that the interface looks much cleaner than Google Reader's, I was not impressed. That's pretty much what Google Reader does. You can then select the title of the article, and Byline starts Safari, which will proceed to load the original article. That's also the information that you see when you select the item in the list. For the feeds (under the heading "new") Byline just downloads the information that's in the feeds themselves. ![]() There is no way to look through individual feeds or folders, like in Google Reader. It then downloaded the 25 most recent items in my feeds and in my starred items. After starting up for the first time, Byline wanted to know my e-mail address and password so it could log on to my Google account. Within a minute, I had the application downloaded and synced to my brand new iPhone 3G. Let's have a look.Īpple has carefully designed the application-buying process (before it, the music- and video-buying processes) such that you hardly notice you're spending money. I was intrigued: considering the free competition, this application had to be either really good or really bad. It's an RSS reader for the iPhone and iPod touch which hooks into Google Reader and has the ability to store pages locally (on the iPhone) for offline reading. Nice try, Google, but it just doesn't work for me. After closing that page and returning to Google Reader, the reader often reloads. The sites open in a separate page in Safari. ![]() Loading full-size web pages-ads and all-on the iPhone is dog slow. This version works extremely well for perusing feeds and marking posts as read or star them for later reading, but actually reading articles through Google Reader mobile is quite painful. Google also has an iPhone-optimized version of its RSS aggregator. ![]() I'm not generally a fan of cloud computing, but in this case it makes sense: you don't need to have the feeds locally if you can't go online and visit the linked articles anyway. So, a couple of months ago, I switched to Google Reader. Years ago when good old Safari turned into Safari RSS, I eased into the habit of finding stuff on the web through RSS feeds rather than by visiting the front page of sites "manually." Unfortunately, Safari's RSS implementation is very slow, especially with some "enhanced" feeds.
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