NZRSS iPhone App
NZRSS is a simple RSS reader, with a simple to use interface (well hopefully anyways). This is made as a free New Zealand RSS reader which replaced the NZHerald RSS reader I wrote earlier on in my learning’s (We had been asked to pull this application by NZHerald).
This only meant that the NZRSS App had to be better!, So I had to add the option to select the feeds you personally would like to read, instead of being stuck with all the feeds, this is where the settings came in, I tried to keep this as simple as possible, so I created checkboxes inside the UITableView’s Cells, this took some time to get working, as I had to keep an Array of which feeds had been checked, and which ones hadn’t. I also wanted a way of being able to check for new feeds, so I added a button to the bottom of the settings table which checks for newly added feeds (more on this shortly). The one thing I have yet to start working on is a system or way of re-ordering the feeds, I will be looking at doing this in a future release.
Once you have selected some feeds, they will show on the main screen, once you select/click a feed, the app then goes and pulls the live RSS feed from the desired source, and parses this ready for the next UITableView to display, this second view only shows the headlines of the selected feed, from selecting/clicking a headline will take you through to that particular article (Note: the amount of content in each article depends on how much content they have on their RSS feed).
I have included a menu bar under the article, which holds different things per article (e.g if there is a full page article link, it will show safari. or if the article has a audio file, this will show a play audio button), I have also added twitter in this menu, and will also be looking at adding more social networking websites to this menu.
That pretty much sums the application up, but lastly, where do the feeds come from? who has control over them? Well The NZRSS reader has a fairly wide list of RSS feeds around New Zealand, this list is currently controlled by Totali, in later versions I hope to add the functionality for users to submit feeds, for now if anyone would like to see any feeds in-particular, please leave me a comment.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.