The other day I wrote about reader.mac.com – something that appeared to be an RSS feed reader web app from Apple for the iPhone. At that time it appeared the service was not yet live.
James B contacted me with some further information:
After some flailing, I managed to get reader.mac.com to spit out something other than a blank page in a desktop browser: Set an iPhone-ish user-agent string, then visit http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http://your.feed/ or whatever.
I suspect the app was ‘live’ all along, and we just didn’t know the correct URL format before :)
Thanks James. James is quite right. It appears that if you enter a feed URL in to Safari on the iPhone, it redirects to reader.mac.com using the URL shown above.
If you want to see an approximation of this because you don’t own an iPhone, you can follow James’s instructions for doing this on Firefox, or use iPhoney. The image on the left is a screen shot of iPhoney using the URL to my blog’s direct feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/curmi
The question I have is, why is this part of the .Mac domain? You don’t need a .Mac account to use reader.mac.com, yet you need one for everything else of .Mac. Why didn’t they call it reader.apple.com? Or reader.iphone.com? The own those domains too.
It all seems a bit odd – either Apple have some interesting plans for .Mac, or they care so little about it it’s become a domain they use when they aren’t sure where to put something. Given how rarely they add new features to .Mac, you do have to wonder…