{"id":13950,"date":"2010-02-23T20:38:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T20:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.razorianfly.com\/?p=13950"},"modified":"2010-03-18T18:53:36","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T18:53:36","slug":"newsrack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/23\/newsrack\/","title":{"rendered":"NewsRack"},"content":{"rendered":"

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication<\/em>, is used on most websites these days to make it easy to tell when new content is available. Our RSS feed can be found here<\/a>. Using RSS you can subscribe to a feed, and read an excerpt of new content without having to visit the site. Google offers a great service for managing RSS feeds called Google Reader<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The app I am bringing to your attention today is called NewsRack, and if you haven’t guessed, it’s an RSS reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch.\u00c2\u00a0The RSS reader market for the iPhone isn’t exactly empty, but in my opinion, NewsRack is the best. Let me tell you why.<\/p>\n

Now there are a few things that I look for in an RSS App, namely the ability to sync with Google Reader, support for landscape viewing and the ability to manage my categories and filter between unread and items i’ve starred. Multiple sharing options is something else I would prefer from my RSS Feeder, be it by Email, Twitter or Facebook.<\/p>\n

While I can live without Instapaper, and I don’t necessarily need search, I believe every RSS app should have most of these points covered if they want to succeed. NewsRack achieves all of these\u00c2\u00a0requirements with leisure, and adds a surprise to the bargain that I’ll get to in a second. NewsRack refreshes quickly, and lets you read feeds while doing it. It features a mini-browser to view articles in their original form. The app has 4 app-wide themes, ranging from blue, to light blue, to dark blue, to black. The sharing menu is customizable for Email, Twitter, Instapaper, Delicious, ReadItLater, Facebook, and sharing on Google Reader. Really, the application isn’t all that different from any other RSS reader on the store, until you notice the tiny button at the top called feeds.<\/p>\n

This is why NewsRack wins my love. Making an RSS application that does everything I need and more wasn’t enough. The developer had to go and make it a real ‘news rack’. When you press the feeds button, the screen morphs, revealing two newspapers sitting in little holders. My newspapers have titles like Engadget, and Ars Technica. That’s right, NewsRack took the idea of a news feed literally. The top left of every newspaper is the site’s icon, while the feed name becomes the newspapers title. The most recent ‘article’ gets to be the front page story, including article text. The upper right corner of the newspapers have a red ribbon if there are unread articles that were posted today, a blue square showing the unread count, and a star indicating starred items in that feed. Swiping left and right rotates the rack to reveal more newspapers. Old or broken feeds even appear faded and yellow! Unfortunately, the newspaper view is only supported in portrait.<\/p>\n

\n


\nIf you have never used RSS before, or if you use it every day, NewsRack is for you. With plenty of in-App customization, a great optimized mini browser, automatic feed discovery and the ability to subscribe to twitter feeds and searches from within the App this really is all the RSS Reader you need.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NewsRack is an RSS Reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch worthy of your consideration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":832,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16,17,2133],"tags":[4,137,2052],"class_list":["post-13950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-app-store","category-iphone","category-ipod","category-news-app-store","tag-apple","tag-appstore","tag-rss-feed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/832"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13950"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14824,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13950\/revisions\/14824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}