The thing I do most on the {en:iphone|iPhone} is read my {en:rss_feeds|RSS feeds} (hosted by {en:google_reader|Google Reader}), so it’s an important app for me.

I’ve tried many many apps since getting the phone and for every app I’ve tried, there is always something not quite right about it. They either have all the features I require and are slow, or are fast but are lacking a couple things I’d find really useful. The two that I switch between are:

NewsRack

NewsRack is an example of a client that has all the features I require (ability to post to {en:facebook|Facebook}, {en:twitter|Twitter}, {en:Delicious_(website)|Delicious} and Read It Later, in-app emailing and the ability to subscribe to feeds in-app), but is to slow on two fronts:

• First, it hangs for me often. It can get quite frustrating at times.
• Secondly – and the show stopper for me – is that it takes quite a while to sync up with Google Reader to get the latest content. If the iPhone could multitask this wouldn’t be an issue (I’d just have it sync every 15 mins in the background) but when I open up my RSS reader I like to see the latest articles without having to wait around – especially as my train journey isn’t that long.

Byline

Byline is an example of a client that lacks features, but sure is speedy. It syncs incredibly quickly and rarely hangs. However, it lacks the features I mentioned in NewsRack. They’ve been threatening an update on their App Store page since I first bought the app, but they’ve yet to deliver. Until yesterday, this was the app I’d use most to view my RSS feeds.

Enter MobileRSS – The One

Yesterday, the App Store’s Genius feature offered up MobileRSS Pro to me. I had a look at the feature list and read the reviews and it appeared to have everything I was after. Given that speed is the deal breaker, and that only I can really vouch for that, I decided to download and put it through it’s paces. I have to say, I’m very impressed.

It syncs fast enough, and also offers the handy feature made famous by {en:Tweetie} where you can refresh on a per folder basis by dragging up to the top and it refreshes.

It also has the other features I wanted:

- Post to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Read It Later (it’s nice to share – it also supports Instapaper)
- In-app email (I quite often email something to {en:Evernote} (ie. add via email) and it’s a pain to come out of the app to do so, as sometimes Byline forgets what it Syncs as a result).

Another nice touch is (and another Tweetie inspired touch), when in list view (eg. you see all items in a feed), the ability to swipe across a headline and it offers up the same options you have when reading the article (eg. Post to Delicious, Read it Later etc). This makes it easy for me to see a headline I’m interested in, but don’t have time to read (or maybe would rather read it on my desktop) and add it to Read it Later. I just did that with “Custom checkbox and radio buttons using CSS” as it’s something I’d like to play with when I’m at an actual PC.

It has in-app subscription to RSS feeds, but not in the way I’d like. They enable you to search for RSS feeds, but they don’t enable you to paste the address of an RSS feed and subscribe that way (like NewsRack does).

Final Wish

Which brings me on to the last item on my wishlist that I’d like to see in an RSS app. Many of my feeds are the shared items of other Google Reader users. It’s a great way to discover interesting content and new sites that otherwise wouldn’t appear on my radar. A handy feature would be to view an item off one of these feeds and subscribe to the site the content comes from.

So for example, let’s say {en:Robert Scoble} shares an article from {en:Mashable}, and I didn’t subscribe to Mashable. When viewing that article it would be nice to tap a button, it then offers a list of feeds associated with that site (I believe Google provides an API to achieve this) and I choose the one I’d like to subscribe to.

Once I’ve got that, I’ll be happy :-)