After I recently blogged about Apple not eating its own dog food, Apple may have decided they better do something before everyone else noticed.
Check out reader.mac.com. If you go to the site without an iPhone, you’ll see a picture that would suggest that this is an RSS reader – and it appears to be an actual web application! All my other complaints about web apps still stand however, but this seems to be evidence that Apple is building a web application for the iPhone.
Now I’m saying “may” here, as the web app appears to not actually be live. If you get your browser (using an appropriate user-agent string), or iPhoney, to go to the web site, you get a blank page.
This RSS reader seems to be a service of .Mac, so it is possible Apple have other features in mind that integrate this with your .Mac account. Perhaps it stores your favourite feeds in your .Mac account? Does that mean people without .Mac won’t get to use this application? More expense after paying for your iPhone? Or do iPhone users get a free .Mac account? We’ll have to wait and see…
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. I’ve actually created a new article (full credit to you) based on what you’ve said here. I appreciate the update.