Byline – iPhone App Review

Byline ($3.99)

Version – 2.5.3

REVIEW – “The news will never pass you by with Byline!”

We live in a world that is being bombarded with news and information 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  With all of the information swirling around us every day how is one possibly supposed to keep up on all of the latest political, social, and technological news?  If you find yourself not having the time you would like to keep up on what’s going on in the world around you then Byline may be just the iPhone app that you have been looking for!

Whether you are a business exec, a carpenter or a stay at home mom we all have things that we like to keep up on but surfing the internet for the latest news can be tedious.  While there are lots of RSS readers out there that can help you manage your news content and view it whenever you want, Byline offers more with its ability to sync and cache all of your feeds for offline use.

Setting up Byline is simple.  All you have to do is add all of your favorite RSS feeds to your Google Feeds account and log in to it from Byline.  Once you log in all of the latest news from your Google Feeds will be synced and cached.  This means that you will be able to view them all even when the internet is not available!  If you open up your “Settings” you will find several options under “Byline” that will allow you to customize exactly what things Byline will cache and under what conditions it will do it automatically.

Once you have everything set up you can start viewing all of your feeds right away.  If all of your feeds have not finished caching yet they will continue to do so in the background.  While the caching feature is certainly nice if you have an iPod, or if you just don’t have good internet service where you are at, the best thing about it is even when you have internet it cuts down load time significantly.  What this means is that you will spend less time waiting for things to load and more time reading the news!

The main screen of Byline will show all of your Google folders just below a tab to view all of your “New Items” and “Starred Items.”  Touching any of your folders will bring up all of the posts inside.  For each post you see the title, a brief description and the date that it was posted on the far right.  Touching a post will bring up just the information that is in the RSS feed itself.  For some websites this is the majority of the text in the post, while for others it is just a short summary.

While you are viewing an individual post you have several options in a menu at the bottom of the screen.  Touching the arrow pointing to the right will take you to the web page that your post is referencing.  You can actually cache these web pages as well as the feeds themselves by either starring an item or enabling web page caching in the “Settings” app.  Some of the other options available in the menu at the bottom of the screen are a “favorite” button, a button to share a link to the article and a button to add a “note” about your current post.

While $3.99 may seem a little steep for an app like this, the time that it has saved me has been well worth it.  Whether you have a job that requires you to stay up to date, you’re very politically minded or you just like to keep up on the quickly moving world of technology Byline can make your life much simpler.  Best of all the developer already has a history of regular app updates and version 3.0 is supposedly right on the horizon.  There has never been a better time to grab an app before the sale ends.  So what are you waiting for?  Check it out in the App Store today!

- David H.

Download Now!

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Developer – Phantom Fish

URL: http://www.phantomfish.com/byline.html

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© 2010, Davidh. All rights reserved.