App update – iNewz

I do a tremendous amount of my online reading with my iPhone / iPod Touch these days. One of the biggest changes I have now (since my handheld is always connected to wifi or 3G) is that I find myself using it almost entirely as my RSS reader (the computer takes a back seat).

This is, however, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, RSS feeds allow me to get exactly the kind of news that I want to get. On the other hand, since RSS feeds allow me to get exactly the kind of news I want to get, it also means I get a narrower perspective on the world. I don’t necessarily get the diverse perspectives I like to read about issues. Nowhere is this more pronounced than the current US presidential election. If you watch Fox news and MSNBC at the same time you’ll hear the exact same stories reported, but you wonder if they were actually looking at the same event. Of course, there is nothing wrong with taking in differing perspectives and then finding your own “truth”.

That is why I was excited when a new application was released a few weeks ago. Instead of giving me just the specific news that I want to get, iNewz allows me to choose a number of different news sources and get my information from them collectively. For instance, if I am getting information about politics, I can now automatically pull from three US sources, one British source, and one Canadian source.  This gives me a much broader world perspective.  If I want to know how the US is being portrayed outside of the country I can get US news from seven different Australian news sources, five Canadian sources, five Irish sources and more. It’s a great way to have a wide perspective in a global world.

Unfortunately, iNewz suffers from two major flaws.

The first, is that there is no ability to access articles off-line. Other RSS readers allow you to save articles in memory for later reading, but iNewz has no such feature. The second major oversight, is that iNewz does not permit the ability to e-mail articles. Yes, you can share them via twitter or delicious, but you can’t e-mail them.

While version 2 of the application came out the other day, and it makes the application even better by adding new sources, simplifying the subscription process, and bringing in bug fixes, unfortunately, it doesn’t address either of these two critical flaws. That means that while the application is excellent, it’s still missing some basic components that prevent me from recommending it at this time.
 

It is available HERE in the App Store for $.99.