1st Impressions

[contributed by David Eaton]

With the increasing popularity of Twitter, many people are predicting the demise of RSS feeds at some point in the future.  I, for one, don’t buy it.  While tweets might be very convenient for folks, the size limitations alone make RSS feeds much more informative if you wish to follow someone’s blog posts.  For that reason alone, RSS Flash g is the ideal program for my iPhone.

I have a back problem which causes me a lot of pain if I spend much time sitting in front of my laptop, but there are several tech related web sites that I like to check on a regular basis.  It’s fine to sign up for the RSS feeds in Google Reader or Outlook, but you then have to sit in front of a PC or laptop to read them.

Enter RSS Flash g. This program is designed for one thing and does it very well – it allows you to access your Google Reader account (hence the “g” in the name) and read them right off the iPhone.  It allows you to sort them by feed or, just like in Google Reader, sort the feeds into folders.  Once the application has synced with your Google Reader account (you can set this up to automatically perform each time you open the application) each feed or folder will display the number of unread items and the grand total of unread items is displayed on the application’s icon.

The app offers a ton of options, including landscape support.  There is a free version as well as a paid version. The free version works well but adds advertisements to each screen.  The full version, priced at $4.99, removes the advertisements and adds the ability to share feeds with your friends via Twitter, delicious, or Instapaper.  While I do not use that particular feature, I am a firm believer in supporting software developers of programs that I use and so I purchased the full version. If I were to be honest, however, I would have to say that, in my opinion, the application is overpriced unless you really want the ability to share feeds with others.

About the only complaint I have with the application is that, despite changing the font size in the settings, the font size remains small and I have a hard time reading it with my tired old eyes.  It may just be something I am doing wrong but reading small text is a small price to pay if I don’t have to sit at my laptop any longer.  As a matter of fact, typing this review is the longest I have spent at my laptop since installing this app a week ago.  RSS Flash g is what gave me that freedom.