I don’t consider myself a newshound, but I do like to be in the know.  I keep an eye on Wiki trends, Twitter trends and get weather and breaking news updates by SMS.   

Anytime a story about the iPhone or BlackBerry comes out, I want to know.  Plus, there are artists, authors, and actors I’m a little ashamed to say I know more about than I probably should. 

RSS feeds are a good way to stay on top of those tidbits and I have three such apps that I rotate among depending on the features included in their latest updates.  But as good as RSS is, it’s a pain to have to mine through 1000+ articles to find that small handful of gems worth my time to read.  

That’s where NewsAlert can be a handy app to have.

If an RSS app is a scalpel, cutting away extraneous stories of little interest to you, then NewsAlert is a high-powered laser allowing you to hone in on what truly matters. With it, you can specify by keyword (choose up to 10 keywords with the initial purchase cost, with the option to buy more) the news issues and topics you want to read about.  Once a keyword is chosen, whenever a story with that keyword is released on the web, you’ll receive a notification. 

The degree of customization is impressive.  You can specify the news sources you don’t want to hear from, the times you want to receive push notifications as well as the total number you wish to receive in a day.  

The app is simple to set up, does what it’s designed to do and quickly became a valuable resource.  It allowed me to keep tabs on issues that don’t often break through the typical news cycle.  

NewsAlert is currently on sale for $.99, so if you’re even slightly interested, snap it up now before the price returns to $2.99.

iTunes Link – NewsAlert

Version 1.3

Tested on an iPod Touch 3.1.3

I once read that in the lobby of Google’s Corporate Headquarters (the so-called Googleplex) are a series of projector screens that show real time aggregated data on active Google searches around the world.  That struck me as an interesting concept, one I thought- for the briefest of moments- would be kind of cool to see in person.

Although the average person may never set eyes on the Googleplex (beyond those exaggerated pics we’ve all gotten via email), we do have resources available that will allow us to see what people all over the world are reading and searching for on the web.

That’s where WikiTrend, from Oooo Software, comes in.  WikiTrend is an app that will allow you to track trend information on Wikipedia.  It will provide a listing of the top recent Wiki hits as well as the top recent Wiki movers. 

If you’re the kind of person who finds him- or herself constantly checking your trend page on Twitter to see what people are talking about, this is the app for you.  If you’re someone who likes to follow the news or wants to go deeper and explore the details behind the headlines, this is the app for you. WikiTrend updates every hour, so you can be reasonably sure that the information you have before you is current and not yesterday’s trends.  And if there’s a topic that you want to gather more information about or explore in more depth, simply click the arrow beside the topic and the app will open the Wikipedia page that addresses the topic in question. 

I was intrigued by this app, if only for the fact that I do try to stay connected with the news of the day via text messages and email from a variety of news agencies.  

I think there are a few things that might be added to further enhance this app.    There aren’t a lot of layers to WikiTrend, meaning that it’s pretty much a what you see is what you get kind of app.  That’s ok, but it does leave a lot to the user to determine and conclude without a lot of data.  For example, this weekend, most of the trending topics have to do with the Olympics or Valentine’s Day.  But determining exactly why can be a challenge.  It would be good to incorporate a brief summary statement for each listed topic so that the user wouldn’t have to guess why an item is trending.  In addition, it would be nice to see this app incorporate trend information from other social networking or bookmarking sites.  Trend information from Twitter, Google, or Yahoo, for example, would be great.  It would be interesting to see the degree to which trends across sites are in agreement. 

But that might be too far outside the scope of an app called WikiTrend that focuses on Wikipedia data. 

Also, it would be good to have fresher trend information.  Hourly updates aren’t a bad start, but a lot can change over the course of an hour.  Stock data is generally down to a 20 minute delay and I think that 20 or 30 minute updates in trend info would be great. 

The bottom line is that if you’re interested in following Wikipedia trends and being aware of what everyone’s talking about, WikiTrend is the app for you.  At .99 cents, it’s not a bad investment at all. 

iTunes Link-  WikiTrend

Version 1.0.0 

Tested on iPod Touch 3.1.2 

Some people are into sports. Really into sports. They’re the go-to-a-game-in-the-middle-of-winter-wearing-only-jeans-and-blue-body-paint kind of people.  I know you’ve seen them; the TV camera always seems to pick them out of the crowd and chances are good that you’ve been seated near a few at least once in your lifetime.  They’re the same people who can effortlessly spout stats for individual players, the teams they play for, the games those teams have won and the games the teams have lost.  Not just for this season, but every game ever played.  They are like walking Wikipedias.

If you’re one of those folks and also like RSS feeds, then Impiger Technologies’ myFeeds is the app for you.  And if you have even a passing interest in sports, then myFeeds is an app you’ll want to check out.

There aren’t a lot of confusing bells and whistles to this RSS app; myFeeds is easy to navigate in its design and boasts an impressive preconfigured collection of sports feeds covering everything from football (yes, both) to Formula 1 racing, from cricket to Nascar. 

The strength of myFeeds lies in its singular sports focus and ability to customize the way you organize your feeds.  There are more preprogrammed sports feeds than you can shake a stick at and, should that not be enough, you can also create specific information categories in which to place those and any new feeds you choose to add.  myFeeds has a few news and weather feeds preconfigured, too.

myFeeds also gives the on-the-go reader who doesn’t have the time to read an entire article the opportunity to cut to the chase and view article headline and a simple sentence summary of the article.  If the user likes the article summary, they can view the full article, cutting down on a lot of unnecessary reading and skimming.

myFeeds is not its challenges, however.  Although it is now able (a new feature in version 2.0)  to add, view, and delete bookmarks, it cannot import or manage Google Reader subscriptions, something a number of other RSS readers are able to do out of the gate.  In order to add feeds beyond those preconfigured in myFeeds, they must be typed out manually.  Unfortunately, there is no feed search option and I found the absence of this feature one that made the addition of new feeds an inconvenient process.  I believe, however, that future upgrades will enable these and other vital features.  Once they’re implemented, I think myFeeds could be competition to those other, more expensive readers.  For now, it can take pride in the fact that it is a great RSS app for sports aficionados.

iTunes Link – myFeeds

Version 2.0

Reviewed on iPod Touch 3.1.2

Bulletin keeps you up to date on all of your RSS feeds through Google Reader and comes with offline browsing, plus sharing options for Facebook, Twitter, Delicious.

iTunes Link – Bulletin

On deck: Hocus Pocus

Stay on top of your fave RSS and Twitter feeds with in-app web browsing and article search. OS3.0+ required!

iTunes Link – Flitter!

Last week I reviewed the overpriced Byline, an RSS reader that requires a Google Reader account. I like things simple so I decided to give Simon Oualid’s app a try. It seemed to work great at first, but after adding a couple of Yahoo! Sports feeds, the thing just froze up. Or at least that’s the way it looked.

The first few times I tried opening my Yahoo feeds and the app stopped responding, I just assumed it had crashed so I hit the ‘home’ button to exit which usually took 30-60 seconds. Later on I figured out that the feed would eventually open, but not until after that 30-60 second wait during which the app would basically play dead and become unresponsive.

This thing would be super if it weren’t for the excruciating wait time to open certain feeds. It’s got a very simple interface and an in-app browser so that you can see your feed content in its original form, and it’ll also tell you if an RSS feed is available when you put in a URL and visit the site… but none of that matters if you have feeds that cause the app to suffer minor heart attacks on a regular basis.

Byline may be overpriced at $4.99 (it was “on sale” at the time of my review) but it works like it’s supposed to, so I’m sticking with that app for now. Simon also has a premium version called Pro RSS Reader which I haven’t tried that costs $1.99 , but I sincerely hope it’s more stable than what I experienced with his free deal.

An update is pending in the iTunes App Store… maybe that’ll fix the problem?

Byline is an RSS reader built specifically for syncing your iPhone with your Google Reader account. If you’re a loyal Google Reader user then you’ll probably love Byline because it pulls everything onto your iPhone so that you can access your content even when there’s no network connection available, like on an underground subway train. If you get your RSS feeds through some other means, then you’ll have to convert to Google before Byline will do you any good.

I had to convert. I went and created a Google Reader account, added a few feeds including my own, and then I opened up Byline. Everything was there which was great, and Byline even provides a button for viewing individual feed items in their original state within the app, just like if you were viewing a webpage in Safari. Nice touch.

But then, like a dumbass, I started poking around to see if I could separate my feeds in the Folders section. What I didn’t realize was that Byline takes its job pretty literally, and that job is basically to sync and nothing more. Folder creation, and most other management-type activities, have to be done within your Google Reader account.

If you read something and then sync, that thing you just read will be removed from your iPhone. If you want to keep it around, you can ’star’ individual items which will file them in the “Starred Items” folder.

So do I like Byline? Yeah… I guess! I’m not a huge fan of Google Reader because, where RSS content is concerned, I have absolutely no interest in creating a profile and sharing crap and whatever else that account allows for. It all seems to contradict the idea of “really SIMPLE syndication”. Plus, I think Google is up to no good! Someday their computers will become self-aware and take over Skynet and will ultimately enslave mankind.

I’ll spare you the rest of my Google rant. As far as Byline goes, it’s a good app that works as promised, although I think Phantom Fish has it a little overpriced at $3.99. For hardcore Google Reader disciples it’s probably worth paying, but I’m a cheap bastard and I don’t think I’d want to pay more than $1-2 when there are several free RSS readers already in the iTunes App Store.

- We’ve expanded the Candidates section to include Public Statements and Issues. The statements are updated several times throughout the week (almost daily) and pull data from Vote-Smart.org. The candidate blog now pulls all the candidate blog data within the application (instead of using the iPhone RSS reader).

- We’ve added more election content to the Polls section. In addition to the Poll of the Day, we are now including electoral data for National and Battleground State polls (from fivethirtyeight.com). We have also added electoral graphs showing the US map distribution of electoral votes, popular vote percentage, electoral vote distribution, and likelihood of winning percentage (also from the five thirty-eight site).

- In the news section, we have adopted user requests and included various new sources.

- We have also introduced a new section called Your Voice, which is a Twitter-like microblog where users can comment in issue-specific forums about what they feel most passionate about.

- We’ve also made various performance and memory improvements to improve load times across the application.

- And finally, we’re making a commitment to keep the application active following the elections. We’re taking requests now about what features to add, but we would like to make Campaign the official news reader for political junkies, not just during campaign season, but in between as well.

10/27/08: Gorloch Interactive provided me with a Campaign update

First things first: if you’re an American adult and you’re not registered to vote, get on it! The deadline for voter registration varies by state, and a lot of states close registration in the first week of October. Here’s a list of state-by-state voter registration deadlines. You can also register to vote within Campaign via Rock the Vote.

That’s my good deed for the day. Now back to business.

Gorloch Interactive’s Campaign is a one-stop shop for all of the 2008 Election coverage you could possibly want. It’s really a pretty nice app if you just can’t get enough of this year’s presidential slugfest, and it’s especially useful if you’re looking for more than the limited political coverage provided by other iPhone news apps.

Campaign’s main attraction is the News section which aggregates campaign news from different sources depending on what you declare as your party affiliation when you first start up the app. Very clever! Nobody wants to read the other side’s blasphemous musings, so kudos to Gorloch Interactive for taking this into account.

I pushed the Democrat button and got news from left-leaning sources like The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, and CNN.com to name a few. After switching to Republican in the iPhone Settings menu, I was shown more conservative reporting that seemed to come mostly from The Washington Times and National Review Online. Stories open within the app which is certainly better than switching to Safari, but I wish it would give me the option to open the stories in Safari if I want to.

Other features include a (weekly?) poll and info that’s specific to each of the major party candidates. Within the sections for Obama and McCain there’s equal access to their biographies and blog posts from each guy’s campaign website.

Everything in Campaign is great for the political junkie but I have one major problem with this app: it seems to get stuck on the “loading” page an awful lot. When this happens I just restart the app and that usually takes care of it, but chronic performance issues in any app get really annoying really fast.

Another improvement that I’d like to see is more than one poll at a time, or maybe even user-created polls.

So, is Campaign worth $.99? Overall it’s a good app that provides content not found in most other news applications, so if you’re a true political groupie then I’d say sure, a buck isn’t asking much and hopefully the performance issues will be addressed with an update in the very, very near future.

There does remain, however, the question of what will become of this app after the election is over six weeks from now? Maybe The Mighty Gorlochs (my secret pet name for the developer) can leave a comment below and shed some light on Campaign’s future for those who are wondering about the app’s longevity.

I hate walking into the office restroom holding a newspaper or magazine because anyone who spots me automatically knows that (a) I’m about to take a huge dump, and (b) I’m a total slacker who prefers to entertain myself on the can rather than work.

Well you know what? Screw them! I do it anyway. Well… I used to. Now that I have Diggerific, I mean Shovel, I’m a lot harder to spot when I’m on a work-avoidance mission.

Shovel really is The Ultimate Bathroom Reader. It’s Digg on your iPhone and, despite the limited functionality, it’s pretty sweet. You’re on your iPhone… do you really need to be able to leave comments and bury things and whatever else loyal Diggers do? Not me. I just want some interesting stories to keep me amused while I’m squeezing one off.

Sprikit has done a really nice job on Shovel, and I love the fact that I can read the full stories within the app instead of having to launch Safari window after Safari window. If there’s anything missing it would have to be search, but even without that it’s still a great app that I use pretty much every day.

If you spend a lot of time taking refuge on the office crapper and you’ve got $.99 to spare, buy Shovel! If you’re also a big pimp and like to wipe your ass with $100 bills, blow the extra $4 for Shovel Donate. Either way, it’s a solid investment.

I have the attention span of a five-year-old and I’m not ashamed to admit it. When I “read” the newspaper I’m not reading the articles… I’m reading the captions under all the nice pictures. This is why I like Jamd – it’s all about photos and the accompanying story capsules that are occasionally weird and are written by people called ‘shindig’ and ‘kitten’. Jamd certainly has a few flaws, but it’s still a pretty cool way to get a quick glimpse of what’s happening out there in the world.

Jamd is divided into three categories: Featured, Breaking, and Popular. Search is also available if the three default categories don’t do anything for you. Tap a story to read more, and the full text of each story comes with a thumbnail photo. Tap the thumbnail and that’s where Jamd starts to work its magic.

Behind each story’s thumbnail photo is usually a whole slew of related photos from the story you were just looking at. Some stories might not have any related photos at all, but if you’re reading about Brad Pitt or the Olympics or something that gets a lot of coverage then the extra photos will be there. Duplicates seem to come with the territory, but they’re easily pushed out of the way with a swipe of the finger.

When looking at a group of photos, or a “stack” as it’s called in Jamd, one finger will move photos around and two fingers will let you resize and rotate the photos. The motion is very fluid and kind of fun to do when there’s a lot to dig through. Double-tap any photo to see the story behind it. Unfortunately Jamd doesn’t let you save the photos directly from the app… Getty Images obviously doesn’t want to encourage that behavior… but you can either take a screenshot or email the story’s web link to yourself and save it from the Jamd website.

Jamd is a great idea that could only be pulled off by a company that owns 70 million photos the way Getty Images does. There’s no question that it’s nicely executed, but the app isn’t perfect… as of right now, none of Jamd’s three categories contains more than 15 stories which is very limiting. I’m also pretty unclear on how stories are classified as Featured, Breaking, or Popular. Check out the screenshots to see what I’m talking about… “Daddy can you buy me a pony” is breaking news? Pffft.

Tons more highlighted content and more logical category placement would make this app Great, but until that happens I’m just going to classify it as Really Good.

Fox News Digital wants ME to report the news! If they knew what a jackass I am they’d probably rethink that proposal.

This app is super simple. Its sole purpose is to let you “take or select pictures of news happening around you and send them directly to FOX News Channel from your iPhone.” If the brains at Fox deem your submission newsworthy, it gets used either online or on TV. Just open the app, take a picture or choose one from your Camera Roll, and submit it to Fox via the app’s built-in email submission form.

I’m a big fan of citizen journalism, but I have kind of a hard time seeing myself using Fox News UReport to do anything but waste some poor intern’s time with pictures of myself on the throne. If I had anything truly newsworthy on my iPhone, would I be sending it to a national news outlet through such an informal channel? Ehhh maybe. If the story’s very small and local, like pictures of a house burning to the ground, then sure. But if Barack Obama’s in the house and John McCain is standing outside with a can of gasoline, I’d probably skip UReport and go for the exclusive deal ‘cuz I gotz ta’ get PAID.

But not everyone is as shallow and greedy as I am. If you happen to be on the scene of something hot and want to see if your photos make the evening news, go ahead and send something to Fox. Who knows, Bill O. might even salute you in his Talking Points Memos. Just be ready for Keith Olbermann to dub you The Worst Person in the World.