Reading Google Reader offline

It’s taken me an age but I finally caught up with my feeds in Google Reader. Being mobile and not always with my laptop meant that Google Reader became an essential tool for managing my blogs. It meant ditching Vienna (which was my feed reader du jour). Moving all of my feeds to the iPhone … Continue reading “Reading Google Reader offline”

It’s taken me an age but I finally caught up with my feeds in Google Reader.

Being mobile and not always with my laptop meant that Google Reader became an essential tool for managing my blogs. It meant ditching Vienna (which was my feed reader du jour). Moving all of my feeds to the iPhone would have been a real pain which is why I was incredibly excited to learn that there was an RSS reader for iPhone which read directly from Google Reader.

Byline, by Milo Bird from London, is a cheap download and shows some amazing polish for a single developer. If it could show/play embedded Youtube links the way Safari does in the OS2.0 version, then it would simply be perfect.

Thinking about iPhone 2.0

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices … Continue reading “Thinking about iPhone 2.0”

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.

We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?

waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone

“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”

Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.

Lots to think about and only a week to go.