Over the years, NewsGator Go! has remained one of my all time favorite mobile RSS feed readers. The mobile client app to NewsGator’s popular RSS aggregation service was been available for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry for some time now. And while the iPhone may not support third party software, yet, Newsgator provides a mobile web accessible service that supports iPhone. Just point Safari (via iPhone) to m.newsgator.com and login to your NewsGator account. From there you can access your feed through a simplified web interface optimized for iPhone. Enjoy!
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The Wall Street Journal has an article on Jobs, his war on hardware buttons, and the minimalism that so often occupies their devices. [via Slashdot]
This guy went off on a rant about Microsoft and their approach to mobiles. I thought it was amusing, so here it is.
The folks at iPhoneDevWiki continue to amaze. You of course remember hello world a few days ago. They’ve apparently moved on from there and have built full apache & python installations on the iPhone, all from that toolchain we reported on. They also continue to make noise on the unlocking front.
Windows users, rejoice: if you wanted to make ringtones out of your MP3, WAV, or OGG collection, there’s a $19.95 $9.95 software package that will do it for you. It’s called iPhoneRingToneMaker, and it turns the process from a long and laborious one to a ridiculously simple one, much easier than the mac apps I reported about yesterday. If you’d rather try before you buy, there is a demo available. [via engadget mobile]
If you’re like me and wanted to be able to tether the iPhone to your laptop and use the iPhone’s EDGE network in the event that no wi-fi is available, you’re in luck. The creativity of the various iPhone hackers doesn’t cease to amaze me: they figured out how to set the iPhone up as a SOCKS proxy. It’s still in the proof-of-concept phase, you can expect it to get easier over time.
Ars Technica reports that NewsGator, owners of the popular Mac RSS client NetNewsWire, announced a web version of their service optimized for iPhone today. Whether you should be using the standard mobile site or optimized iPhone site is auto-detected when you sign on. If you read news on the iPhone, it will be synced back via the NewsGator service and you won’t have to read that article on the desktop client.
AT&T posted their 3rd quarter earnings this morning, and there’s some good news in it for everyone. There’s only 2 days worth of iPhone coverage in that quarter, but it’s interesting that they activated 146,000 people in those two days.
Sales of the Apple iPhone have been robust. The June 29 launch allowed for less than two days of sales and activations before the end of the quarter. In that time, AT&T activated 146,000 iPhone subscribers, more than 40 percent of them new subscribers. Sales of the iPhone continue to be strong in July with store traffic above historical levels.
The 40% new subscribers is a higher number than I’d seen; I believe the estimates I was seeing were more around 25%. It will be interesting to see what kind of churn the other carriers experience; granted, 146,000 customers might just be a dip of a percentage point, if that.
It looks like an enterprising member of Howard Forums found references in code to widgets and applications that don’t yet exist on the iPhone; that is to say, they’re not public yet: Translator, Unit Converter, Business Phonebook, and Radio.
[thanks, cmaier]
There are new easy GUI interface applications for stuff that was once hard. Isn’t that the story of the Mac’s life, though? Activating, formerly a $2000 and 500,000 step process, has now been reduced to just $0 and 9 steps or so. Brilliant! And installing ringtones, previously a journey fraught with peril, with despair at every step, had now just requires you to kill the iTunes helper process and maybe force-quit the app here and there to unfreeze. Um, sorry. Great news for Mac users. iActivator, the front end for iPhone activation, is Mac only at this point. It’s the same story with custom ringtones, Mac-only. Hopefully the .NET GUI interfaces for Windows are on the way soon.
