MobileRSS Pro for iPhone, Surprisingly Good Feed Reader. Review and Giveaway.

I think the quest for the perfect iPhone RSS reader will never end, mostly because it’s not clear what people exactly want from that kind of application. Some people say they just want a simple app that could notify them of new items, some want tons of features, some don’t even  know what they want but still they write blog posts about the subject. In the past we’ve covered apps such as Reeder and Newsprint, but today we’d like to take a look at MobileRSS Pro from NibiruTech.

I must admit I never really considered this app before, maybe because of the UI or just because of the not-so-appealing name, but it turns out MobileRSS Pro is a pretty good application with a clean design, surely worth a mention. Also, 8 promo codes up for grabs.

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Buzzie Launches as the First Google Buzz iPhone App

Link

“Buzzie appears to share a lot of design cues with the popular iPhone app Tweetie. It also does pretty much everything you would expect: You can view posts from your Google Buzz followers, create public and private Buzz posts, and add new followers from within the app. Buzzie can also show you Buzz conversations near your location.

For a first release, the application is fast and polished — though it lacks any truly distinguishing features from Google’s web interface. Heavy Buzz users will find it easier to use than the online interface, but I’m not sure if casual users will see enough benefit to justify paying for the app.”

$1.99 in the App Store.

Gmail-like Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app

Attachments, I hate them. Still, most of the times I have to deal with them as it’s only way (for many people) to quickly receive files.And most of times, I forget to include attachments.

Thanks to Sebastian de With (@Cocoia) I’ve just found out this neat plugin for Apple’s Mail that warns you everytime you mention an attachment in the body of a message but you didn’t attach it. From the website:

“When you send a message, it checks if there’s an attachment. If there isn’t, and it looks like you’ve referred to an attachment in the body of your mail (by using a word like attach, attaching, attachment, etc), it gives you a warning. Most of the time, you should never notice that this plugin is running.”

And it works great. Invisible, useful, free. Must have.

Download

RapidID, Quick Contacts for iPhone. 7 Promo Codes Up for Grabs.

My iPhone contacts are pretty much messed up. I don’t know why, maybe I did something wrong while syncing with Mac OS’ Address Book, probably it’s just that I need to pay more attention when I add new contacts. But anyway, I’ve got these duplicate contacts, wrong names and numbers, missing photos.

Some days ago I was emailed this neat application for review, and after some “real life” testing I’m sure I’ll keep this on my iPhone. It’s called RapidID, it’s a fast and great-looking contact “manager” for iPhone and we’ve got some copies to give away.

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Apple Planning Cloud Based Video Storage. Put Simply, the Cloud.

Link

And Gruber nails it:

“Think of this model as like IMAP for iTunes content — it would also allow multiple devices (computer, iPhone, iPad) to remain in sync over the air, rather than the current model where devices need to be tethered via USB to your computer in order to sync. I think this would be fantastic. As it stands now, iTunes customers are responsible for the data integrity of their purchases.”

But then again, let’s look at the whole picture and assume Apple plans to integrate iTunes with the cloud even for mobile devices (and considering Apple’s policy regarding consistency between different experiences, I don’t see why they shouldn’t do so.),bringing over the air syncing for apps and music streaming. Basically, iTunes.  There’s this big elephant in the room once again, AT&T. How are they going to deal with that? Perhaps they’re simply procrastinating the cloud waiting for AT&T to fix their networks? The easiest solution would be to offer the cloud service under wifi only, but that would be a huge limitation. And considering that they wanted the iPad to have a 3G connection (even if many people swear they’ll buy the wifi only version) available at launch, I don’t think we’re gonna see a half sized, desktop-only cloud service. It’s the full thing or nothing.

But what if Apple is thinking about syncing user’s data and preferences over the cloud, and not the files themselves?

Photobag, Geo-based Photo Organizer. Review and Giveaway.

They say the best camera is the one that’s always with you. I’m not a photographer, but I don’t mind taking some pics with my iPhone when I can, so I couldn’t agree more with this expression.

Let’s focus on the iPhone: the App Store has thousands of photography app, probably one of the best selling categories. Apps for digital flash, digital zoom, quick editing, Flickr uploading, everything. There are also many apps that integrate geo tagging seamlessly and usefully, thanks to the built-in iPhone capabilities.

Today we’d like to talk about a new app that got accepted by Apple 2 days ago, and that’s very promising. It’s called Photobag, and we have 10 promo codes up for grabs.

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Attic Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Attic giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Tapku developers for the codes they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Weito

John Espino

Joekw

Mathew Rice

iMaddin

You’ll receive the code in your inbox in a matter of a few hours.

Cheers!

Subler, Great App to Embed Subtitles in Quicktime. Mux MP4 Files. Open Source.

Hosted on Google Code, Subler (by Damiano Galassi) is an open source application for Mac OS X that enables you to mux .mp4 files. For those who don’t know mux (from multiplexing), it’s a device that selects one of many analog or digital input signals and forwards the selected input into a single line. (Wikipedia)

Basically, Mux allows the creation of tx3g subtitle tracks compatible with most every Apple product out there, not to mention full Quicktime compatibility. It’s got tagChimp support, you can play around with the iTunes metadata (you can even add metadata unavailable in other apps, such as the HD tag) and it supports the following formats: .h264, .264, .aac, .ac3 and .scc.

What’s so great about Subler is how easily it lets you edit stuff. Whether you need to add soft subtitles, remove audio tracks and cut chapters Subler is just perfect. Also, with this process you can avoid the conversion time of burning subtitles in the video with Quicktime or Perian: you can just use Subler to mux the .srt file.

Overall, Subler is the best solution to quickly embed subtitles in a Quicktime movie. And I think that’s a great achievement.

Virgin America Rejects Flash. “HTML Is Good Enough”

Link

“Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.

Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla told The Reg: “I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin].”

See? It’s that easy.