Apple to Offer RSS Reader for iPhone?

Apple will be offering an RSS application on Safari for the iPhone, said some who have seen a new page on Apples own site. The page initially showed a screenshot of what appears to be an RSS list on an iPhone, but that image has since been replaced with an iPhone showing its main screen.

Early reviews of the iPhone, which is scheduled to go on sale June 29, have indicated that, unlike desktop versions of Safari, the Safari Web browser included in the iPhone does not include a built-in RSS reader.

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The RSS format has been growing in popularity in recent years. Sites ranging from blogs to major organizations such as CNN use RSS feeds to "push" posts and news stories to readers.

Alykhan Jetha, the CEO of Toronto-based Marketcircle visited the Reader page with his companys iPhoney, a free iPhone Web simulator which allows Web designers to see how their pages will appear on the iPhone.

Jetha said that doing this returned a blank page. But, he said, this could mean Apple has simply not activated the service.

Developing this application, Jetha said, "could also be Apple showing us that its eating its own dog food, showing developers how easy it is to create a Web 2.0 application for the iPhone."

Jetha said that iPhoney, which is a universal binary Cocoa application and was written in Objective-C, "was a case of our engineers doing it on the side as a fun project—we want to give back to the community thats helped us in the past."

Marketcircle announced June 28 an updated version of iPhoney, adding the ability to disable all plug-ins, such as Flash, to more closely mimic the iPhone Web experience, the changeable user agents and the ability to scale a Web page to look like the iPhones zoom feature. iPhoney 1.1 is also now open source and available on SourceForge.

Apple representatives were unavailable for comment.

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