Instapaper Pro
Spare your thumb and forefinger all that pinching and zooming by taking advantage of Instapaper’s iPhone-friendly formatting of Web pages.
On first glance, Instapaper might seem like an underpowered online bookmarking service. But closer inspection quickly reveals an indispensable tool for anyone who enjoys reading long articles online.
Instapaper’s utility is found in its dedication to simplicity, and in its flawless reformatting of Web text for the iPhone’s smaller screen. It works like this: After signing up for an account at instapaper.com, you click a provided bookmarklet in your Web browser to save the current Web page for later reading. Instapaper then strips everything but text from the Web page, optimizing the column width and text size for the iPhone. It’s impossible to fully understand how wonderful this is until you’ve spent some time waiting for a 400KB graphic to load over Edge in Mobile Safari during a long commute.
Adjustable font sizes and a choice of text and background colors complement the default formatting. Articles can be emailed or opened in Mobile Safari, and an optional tilt control allows you to scroll by leaning your touch to one side. Although we prefer saving articles through a desktop Web browser, the bookmarklet works well enough in Mobile Safari.
A more limited free version of the app offers the same saving and recall but removes the font options and tilt scrolling. The website offers access to your saved articles through your desktop Web browser and is almost always open in one of our tabs.
Developer: Marco Arment
www.instapaper.com
Price: $9.99
Document Format: Web pages
Netnews Wire 
Books and other long-form writing aren’t the only quality reading opportunities on the Web. For weblogs and other periodicals, RSS feeds remain the most efficient and convenient format—especially if you follow a lot of different sites. NetNewsWire’s iPhone app brings much of its desktop RSS reader’s convenience to the iPhone, as well as robust syncing between the iPhone, Mac, and PC.
For users already using the desktop version, the iPhone app immediately syncs with your existing account at Newsgator.com, downloading all unread items in your existing feeds. Items viewed in the iPhone app are marked read in the desktop app when the latter syncs, and vice versa. Important items are easily saved for later retrieval in your account’s Clippings folder, though the contents of the folder are only accessible from the desktop application.
The app’s usefulness and ease are largely provided by what it leaves out. The advanced features found in the desktop application—flagging items, organizing feeds into folders, etc—are ignored in favor of reliable reading and simple navigation. It’s very much intended to supplement the desktop app rather than supplant it. Overall, it’s smart philosophy, though we do wish for a way to easily add feeds found in Mobile Safari to our NetNewsWire collection.
Developer: Newsgator
www.newsgator.com
Price: Free
Document Format: RSS
the_saltminer
December 09, 2008 at 12:14pm
Maybe Fictionwise is big in Springfield, Missouri, but I've never heard of it. I'll check it out.
Robotech_Master
December 03, 2008 at 2:08pm
How can you bemoan the fact that "most commercial e-book stores are useless to the iPhone, including Amazon’s Kindle Store"? What planet do you live on? The Kindle store is not the be-all and end-all of e-books, you know.
Are you not aware of Fictionwise's eReader application? You know, Fictionwise, pretty much the biggest name in e-book sales who isn't Amazon? The people who've been in business for about ten years, and bought their only major competitor, eReader (nee Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press)? (Also, Stanza just added support for eReader files to its own client, but that happened today, well after this article was written, so we can leave that aside.)
And how can you leave out the other e-book applications, such as Bookshelf? Granted, Bookshelf costs $10, but it's a lot better reader for the (unencrypted) Mobipocket format than Stanza, which strips out all formatting including italics and boldface from converted Mobi or HTML files.
Come on, guys, do a little research, huh? Here would be a good place to start.
macvos
December 02, 2008 at 4:50am
When someone types the AirSharing url http://iphone...etc.local:8080/ in any browser (be it desktop or another iPhone), they get a really cool browsing experience! They can browse files, read and/or download them right from your phone.
