What’s a sweatshop without a little fun?

One of the best things about the iPhone is the constant internet access it provides.  The phone is small enough that you take it anywhere, and as long as you’re inside AT&T’s coverage area, you can do anything at all over the internet cloud that you could normally do from home.  This point really probably doesn’t need much support, you know what I’m talking about.

There are around one to two dozen sites that I want to check every day, just to see if there’s something new.  Sites like I have on my blogroll, technology sites, and comedy websites all update rather frequently, and going to check each site individually can be a long process.  That’s where probably my favorite iPhone apps come into play.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication; it’s a technology that allows you to see all the articles on a site in a XML (read: data a computer can use easily) format.  RSS readers are applications that have a set list of website RSS feeds that they check.  Whenever there is a new article in the RSS feed, the application will let you know.

There are many RSS readers for the iPhone, and I’ve tried all but a couple of them.  They are, by and large, great.  With my RSS reader in my pocket, I can check all the websites that matter to me when I have 10 or more minutes to kill.  RSS reader applications are the most important internet applications, to me, on the iPhone.

The RSS reader I use is called, appropriately, Reader.  You can find it in the iTunes store here.  It’s a new application and it does a lot of things right along with a few face-plant style errors and omissions.  Just the way great applications do it.

Prose

I find that reading anything longer than a few sentences on the iPhone is done best in landscape mode, so I need any RSS reader to allow me to orient at least the articles into landscape mode. I can navigate the sites and article titles in portrait mode, but I have to be able to read the articles in landscape. There are only a couple apps I know of that allow landscape mode, and Reader is one of them.

Reader presents the articles themselves in what is probably the best style theme of any reader.  The article title and byline are very clearly separated from the content of the article without taking up too much room.  I really enjoy navigating around the interface, which is clearly well thought out.

Cons

Crashes. Loses track of itself. Won’t update.

As you can see, there are a lot of major show-stopping bugs in this application. Like all other apps I’ve used, Reader will occasionally crash when you stress it. I really feel like this is not the enormego’s (the app’s creator) fault, but Apple’s. However, it is annoying.

More troubling is that when I am on a wireless network that is connected to the internet by a proxy (like at work), the app acts like it updates the feeds, but clearly doesn’t.  It updates for under one second, then leaves all the sites the same.  Updating behind a proxy is broken, the fix is to turn WiFi off (easily done under the Settings app) and update again.  Forcing an update is not as easy as it should be, however, because you can not update from all pages, as you should. I have to feel like this is a rather common situation, and they will fix it soon.  I hope.

The last major defect is very hard to describe.  There are times when you navigate from a list of articles to a list of sites, and the app breaks.

While the site list should look like this...

...It actually looks like this

The navigation bar changes but the contents don’t, which leaves you in a state of limbo, unable to do anything.  I don’t know how to reproduce it, exactly, but I just know it’s very annoying.

Summary

Despite the embarrassing flaws, this is a very polished app that I enjoy using every day.  Along with bug fixes, I hope enormego adds some functionality, like a badge number for the unread articles, Google Reader integration, and allowing the user to update from any tab.  These would really make for my perfect RSS reader.  As it stands now this is the best RSS app I have used for the iPhone, making it the best app in the best category of apps for my iPhone.