I have tried too many iPhone RSS apps and I still couldn’t find a good one. Until MobileRSS came along, at least for now.

Apps of these categories I’ve tried are either slow, too fancy, crashes often, doesn’t let you navigate your folders etc.

MobileRSS seems to solve these problems. It’s blazing fast (I am impressed), easy on the eyes and there are some features that are just plain useful, although they seem to be copied from Tweetie and ReadItLater (which is a good thing for this instance!).

User Interface

MobileRSS spots a straightforward interface, but they didn’t just leave it as that. You can also choose a darker theme if you like.

You can hit “Show All” at the bottom if you also want to see all your folders, otherwise leave it as “Show Updated” so that your screen won’t be cluttered.

This is the alternate theme of the interface which the developer call it “Black”, doesn’t look exactly black to me but, it sure looks like a decent alternative to the default theme.

Set your preferences or add a feed all on this screen.

Speaking about “add a feed” function, I never get it. I have never added a feed on the go (have you?) because if I do, I must be spending way too much time on my iPhone when I’m out. But MobileRSS’s “add a feed” function is different. It allows you to search for a feed using a keyword instead. Type a keyword and boom, you’re able to add the feed in an instant via the search result. But please note that this function is only available on the Pro ($4.99) version. Read on to see the differences between different versions of the same app.

Pull Down To Refresh

NibiruTech aren’t the first to copy this useful feature.

In fact I wish that more developers would follow this, if Loren wouldn’t mind.

Swipe For More Functions

Swipe and you will be able to do more with a feed, star, share, write a note etc.

For even more functions, hit the very familiar arrow icon on the right most side of the interface.

Sharing

You can share articles on Twitter, Facebook, ReadItLater, Instapaper, Delicious and good old email.

Don’t use some of them? Turn them off from the menu in settings.

Orientation Lock

Guess what? This is actually copied from ReadItLater.

When you see this “lock” icon, you can choose to lock it so that your orientation will be locked and vice versa.

Remembers Last Position, Offline & More

MobileRSS also remembers your last screen so that when you re-launch the app, you won’t feel like you left the app. Though, I find it sometimes buggy especially when I’m on the main article reading screen.

When I re-launch the app and the feeds are refreshing themselves, the article I was reading changes to another random article. This is what I hope the developer will eventually fix.

On a train, underground, or at anywhere with no internet access? Your articles (and images too) are stored offline so you can read it when you’re not connected.

Conclusion

The only problem I have is that there isn’t much distinction between the paid and free versions, except that the free one has ads. I used the free version for quite some time without getting annoyed at the ads as they’re surprisingly unobtrusive, but decided to part with my money just to support the developer.

If you decide to buy this app, here’s the differences between the three versions of MobileRSS:

• MobileRSS Free (Free, green icon) – Full Featured | Ads supported | No search and subscribe function
• MobileRSS ($2.99, orange icon) – Full Featured | No Ads | No search and subscribe function
• MobileRSS Pro ($4.99, blue icon) – Full Featured | No Ads | With search and subscribe function

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

Delicious users rejoice! Finally, a beautiful and unobstrusive Delicious client for the Mac!

I’m a Delicious user myself, I love storing things in the cloud so that I can access stuff from anywhere. I also love being able to access stuff in the cloud natively on my Mac. In this instance, I can now add, search or share bookmarks in my Delicious account from my Mac enjoyably.

If I were to use an app daily, the app has to look good, Delibar by Shiny Frog kicks all the other Delicious client to the curb!

What I Look For In A Delicious Client

My expectations are simple. It has to look decent, able to let me search my bookmarks, access my recent bookmarks, save bookmarks from any browser I am on and most importantly, to be able to hide the icon because I really does not need it to clutter my dock! Delibar exceeds my expectations with more.

Interface

I’m just gonna let the looks do the talking. Well, okay. The sleek interface is split into four categories – Bookmarks, Recent, Network and Saved.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks lets you do searches on your Delicious account.

You can even do smart searches by using smart operators inside your search.

Use the “-” operator to exclude the next word or enclosing a string of words in quotes to search it in full phrase.

Recent

Want to access a recently saved bookmark? It’s all there on recent.

Network

You can keep up with your network’s bookmarks from here.

Saved

This one is pretty cool. If you frequently find yourself searching for certain bookmarks, for example icons, you can save the search under this tab! Much like how Twitter’s saved searches work.

Multiple Accounts

With the multiple accounts feature, you do not need to sign in and out of Delicious to access other accounts. That’s if you are a Delicious power user with multiple accounts, this will be very useful.

Social Network Sharing

Social media is on the rise these days and it is very smart of them to include social sharing as a feature! You can share you bookmarks via Twitter, Facebook, Delicious itself, email or MarsEdit. Need a short URL of that bookmark? Click the URL shortening icon and Delibar will shorten the URL for you via bitly and copy the resulting short URL to your clipboard!

Adding Bookmarks

Delibar incorporates the adding of bookmarks with your web browser via a bookmarklet. To add notes to your bookmark, just select any chunk of text on the page before clicking the bookmarklet. Delibar will also present to you a list of popular tags suggested by Delicious so that you can click on them to quickly add tags to your bookmark.

Conclusion

ShinyFrog recently reduced the pricing of Delibar from 18€ to USD$18. A good move by the developers in order for more people to come to terms with the price of the app.

If you’re a Delicious user, this is one app you cannot miss!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

iPhone apps are extremely useful in our day to day lives, great design and user interfaces enhances our experience and makes us want to use it more, thus solving  day to day problems become whole lots of fun while enhancing productivity. Here are 21 essential iPhone apps that are extremely useful, coupled with visually appealing interfaces. If you have any recommendations please feel free to leave a comment. Enjoy!

Groups

[$2.99 | Website | iTunes]

A highly potential iPhone native “Contacts” app replacement. With groups you can manage your contacts easily, organizing them using drag and drop. Your created groups will synchronize with iPhone’s Contact app. Email groups of people easily with this app, call or SMS anyone easily, all with a very sexy interface.

User Interface

Cha-Ching

[$2.99 (Introductory Price) | Website | iTunes]

Cha-Ching was originally a Mac app (current version 2.0 beta, free until 30 April 09) designed for personal finance management. The highly anticipated iPhone app was only recently released at the App Store. I’ve tried many similar apps of the same genre and this is the best looking one in my opinion.

User Interface

Analytics

[$5.99 | Website | iTunes]

Analytics lets you check your Google Analytics data and reports on the go. At times you might find this app even easier to analyze Google Analytics data than the web app.
User Interface

Ego

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Ego gives you one central location to check your Mint (number of visits), your total number of Twitter followers, Feedburner stats and Google Analytics stats on the go. Very convenient way to streamline the checking of your numbers, or your ego so to speak.
User Interface

Weightbot

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Weightbot is a weight tracking app designed to let you meet your weight losing goal. Set your goal weight, record your weight at any interval (one weight per day max), view your BMI, and see your progress on a beautiful graph.
User Interface

Tweetie

[$2.99 | Website | iTunes]

Tweetie is (in most people’s opinion) the best Twitter iPhone app available on the App Store. The most distinctive difference between Tweetie and the rest of the Twitter apps in the store is it’s extremely smooth scrolling. You can do most major functions like reply, direct message, retweet, Twitpic, Instapaper integration, search, save searches, trends or even look at tweets by nearby tweeple (using the GPS) etc.
User Interface

Tumblr

[Free | Website | iTunes]

If you use Tumblr, you’ll love this app as you’ll be able to update your Tumblr blog easily.  Most often than not I use this app to quickly snap pictures and upload it to my Tumblr.
User Interface

Byline

[$4.99 | Website | iTunes]

Byline is an RSS reader that synchronizes flawlessly with Google Reader. The best and most good looking Google Reader app I’ve found, the plus point of this app is that for every article you marked as favorite, the whole article will be downloaded into Byline so that you can read it offline, good feature if you want to read your favourite articles without having to wait for the article to be downloaded while on your daily commute.
User Interface

Tags

[$2.99 | Website | iTunes]

Tags is a Delicious app that syncs all your bookmarks from your Delicious account. I guess the reason why this app is named “Tags” is because of the unique way your bookmark tags are displayed (as seen from the screenshot). If you’re a Delicious user and there is only one app you can download, make it this one.
User Interface

Satisfaction Remote

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

This is an accompanying app for Get Satisfaction users who wants to check discussions on the go. Find companies, products or people, find and read support topics of your favourite apps. Reply or comment on a topic.
User Interface

iStat

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

iStat lets you remotely monitor your Mac’s CPU, memory, disks, temperatures, fans, uptime and load averages all from your iPhone. This app also lets you see your iPhone’s stats for memory, disk space, WiFi and Cell IP addresses, uptime & load averages, plus view and email your iPhone’s Unique ID and MAC address. Pinging and traceroute functions are also supported.
User Interface

CompareMe

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

This app lets you compare any 2 product’s prices by their quantity, volume, lengths etc. A simple example will be – 3 for $1.75 or 2 for $1.35, which is cheaper? CompareMe will tell you that in a split second. Good for price conscious shoppers, helps me heaps when doing grocery shopping!
User Interface

Tipulator

[$0.99 | Website | iTunes]

Having trouble doing mental calculations on the tips you need to pay on top of the total price of your dinner and how much each of your friends need to pay? Tipulator solves this problem, with a literally “sweet” looking interface.
User Interface

Measures

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Measures lets you convert units like currencies, temperatures, weight, distance etc. What I like about this app is not only the interface and the icon, there is an inline calculator built into the app for calculations while letting you view the converted value during the process. Great when shopping for multiple items at a foreign country.
User Inteface

GuitarToolkit

[$9.99 | Website | iTunes]

GuitarToolkit is packed with a slew of utilities to compliment your guitar playing experience. It includes the most notable guitar tuner (using the iPhone microphone) which proves to be extremely accurate, a metronome, a library of over 1500 chord variations which is highly recommended for beginners learning guitar.
User Inteface

Inquisitor

[Free | Website | iTunes]

The very popular Inquisitor browser plugin now comes to the iPhone. With the same sleek interface, Inquisitor lets you quickly search anything on the web. Keep in mind that the search engine used is a Yahoo search engine, if you’re a staunched Google user you might not be very fond of that. But if you’re a staunched designer, the sexy interface will make up for it.
User Inteface

Flickit

[Free | Website | iTunes]

At last, an iPhone app that lets you upload multiple photos to Flickr! Via a beautiful interface (and can’t believe it’s free!), you can snap a photo or choose your desired photo(s) from your photo library for upload.
User Interface

Night Stand

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Night Stand displays a beautiful, vintage LCD clock on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It sports two variations: flip clock and vintage LCD display. There’s also an alarm clock built into this app.
User Interface

Faces

[$0.99 (Sale for a limited time) | Website | iTunes]

Faces is a visual quick dial application. Calling or SMSing a friend is just a click away upon launching the app, launch time is quite fast I would say. You can also sort contacts into groups so that you can find your desired person to call/SMS more easily. Yes you can find many quick dial apps on the store, but spotting one with a pleasing interface is hard. You can even customize the background by using a picture from your photo library.
User Interface

Classics

[$2.99 (Sale for a limited time) | Website| iTunes]

Classics has one of the best user interface for reading classic tales including Gulliver’s Travel, The Time Machine, Frankenstein, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (illustrated), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, among many other books. Highly recommended for classic tales fans, even if you’re not you might just fall in love with it.
User Interface

Things

[$9.99 | Website | iTunes]

The very popular and extremely useful GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity app deserves a mention here. If you have not heard of Things, this app lets you handle your to-do lists systematically. Also check out the awesome Things Mac app.
User Interface

ConvertBot

[$0.99 | Website| iTunes]

For only 99 cents, you get an awe-inspiring unit converter that converts angles, area, currencies, length, mass, power, pressure, speed, temperature, time, volume etc. One thing to note is that only a couple of currencies are supported, do check if your country is supported at the App Store before buying.
User Interface

Outpost

[$12.99 | Website| iTunes]

I have always wanted to try Basecamp but haven’t found the reason to, but if you are one proud user, you’ll be able to appreciate this native iPhone app for Basecamp. Outpost brings the power of Basecamp to your iPhone or iPod Touch, with comprehensive support for messages, milestones, to-dos, and comments. Outpost is also the first app for Basecamp which offers full offline capabilities.
User Interface

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

Flock 2.0 (Mac & PC) is not only a web browser but it is optimized for your social needs. You can pack all your social services into the browser’s sidebar also known as the “Friend Activity Widget”, tracking them every second while you browse.

RSS feeds are also browsable through the sidebar just by switching tabs.

Social Networking

Social and other services supported by Flock includes MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Delicious, Gmail, YouTube, Wordpress, Photobucket, Blogger, Yahoo Mail, Magnolia, Blogsome, Livejournal, Xanga, Typepad, AOL mail, Picasa and Piczo.

Adding Facebook to the Friend Activity Widget for instance, will enable you to track your Facebook friend’s updates.

Tracking your friend’s updates couldn’t be easier, think of it as a great way to keep your friends close to you at all times.

One of the perks of this concept is the ease in which you share content with your friends, eg. to share a link, image or video that you’ve found while surfing, just drag and drop the media or link into your friends on the left.

Blogging

Not only can you track your friend’s updates and all your RSS feeds (which you can sort them into different folders) on the left side bar, you can also post blog entries using the browser itself, no I don’t mean visiting the blogging site to post entries, Flock features it’s own dedicated blogging editor for your blogging needs.

Posting pictures can also be done via a dedicated photo upload interface, just drag and drop!

Browsing media

Browing photos and videos with Flock is one of the best experience I’ve seen. Just click on the media icon on the sidebar and you’ll be able to search for Flickr photos at the top of the browser. Thumbnails are layed out neatly in a horizontal format, Flickr page will be fetched upon clicking. If you’re a heavy “Flickr searcher” this browser is it!

You can also search Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, YouTube, just to name a few. Very neat and useful integration.

My World

To view all your friend’s updates, RSS feeds, your favourite media (photos & videos) all at once, just click the My World icon on the sidebar. The fastest way to get an all round update of what you’re interested in.

My experience using Flock 2.0

Flock is a promising web browser if you’re a social networking addict. Having Facebook, Twitter and Flickr etc on the sidebar enabling me to check updates in real time is more than I can ask for.

Not mentioning being able to access Delicious bookmarks on the sidebar and dragging links into my Delicious folders directly, which is a plus.

The downside of the browser is that I can’t seem to click on any links on the sidebar that my friends posted, be it Facebook or Twitter. There is also no way to post new tweets or Facebook statuses right from the sidebar itself.

New updates does not invoke Growl notifications unlike Eventbox, though this might not be an issue for some people.

Finally, the browser seems to keep crashing frequently which I suspect is a result of bloating up the browser with too many RSS feeds. That might not be the cause of the crashes but whatever cause it is, it wasn’t a good experience for me at all.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that this issue might just be a one off, and I am sure the developers are still working hard on stabilizing Flock.

A great app in general, Try it for yourself!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool: