Gazette for iPhone
★★★★
Gazette is a native Google Reader app for iPhone by Matt Rajca. It syncs read/unread status with your Google account as a background task, maintains the same folder hierarchy as the web app and supports offline browsing of feed content (changes are pushed to your account once network access is restored).
The interface is simple and slick, offering a handful of options through the iPhone’s system-wide Settings app, including whether or not to display the unread count as an overlay to the app’s Springboard icon, and the number of items to pre-fetch when syncing.
The default page view when clicking through from feed items is Google’s GWT-parsed mobile view, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to change this behaviour, however the actions menu provides an “Open Original in Safari” option. You can, of course, scroll to the bottom of a mobile-formatted post and request the original HTML version, but I’d prefer an option to always see the HTML in the built-in browser. That’s my only real complaint with the app so far. Five Four stars for simplicity. (App Store, US$1.99)
Update: After a couple more weeks with Gazette I’m revisiting my review and deducting a star. The more I use the app, the more frustrated I am by the needless taps required in edge cases, such as when there’s only a single feed containing unread items in a particular folder. In this case, it would be useful if Gazette skipped listing the feed name and instead jumped forward two screens to show the items; I can see the feed name in the button at the top of the page, there’s no need for an extra tap when it’s the only option. Similarly, when I mark all items as read in a feed, why return me to the parent list if this was the last feed containing unread items? Some extra smarts around lists containing a single item would make the app feel much snappier. My other gripe is with the built-in browser: it doesn’t support the usual pinch gesture (or any other method) for resizing GWT-parsed content.
