Native Google Reader App on Your iPhone
Update 04/02/2008: You can now download an alpha version.
For a few days now, I’ve been playing around with the iPhone’s unofficial SDK on my Ubuntu machine. Last friday, I finished milestone I of my very first app. It’s a simple news reader using the (also still unofficial) Google Reader API. Currently, it does retrieve your feeds and entries directly from Google every time you view them, so it’s not very useful in places without W-LAN (which, according to rumors, still exist). But now that the fundamentals are there, I’m going to add the really cool features.
My wish list:
- Store all data in a local SQLite database
- Allow the user to search amongst feed contents and the tagging system
- An offline mode
- One-Button-Synchronization™ between the iPhone and Google Reader
As soon as the basic offline features are working, I’ll probably upload a beta version on this blog along with the source code. Until then, here are a few screenshots.
Screenshots
In the settings screen you can completely customize the application to match your personal preferences. Well, not really, but at least I spoil your eyes with a few icons from the fantastic fam fam fam icon set.
This is the feed view. In future versions it will hopefully be possible to swap between different feeds by just vertically scrolling beyond the visible area.
PS: I know that with MobileRSS there already is a native news reader for the iPhone. While it is indeed a very cool app, I don’t like the fact that I have to manage my subscriptions twice: once on my iPhone and once on my desktop. Apart from that it’s also fun to see your own application running on your iPhone (or iPod Touch in my case) 
