On the subject of MarsEdit… I’ve been more than a little disappointed with the iPhone version of NetNewsWire (if you don’t know the connection, you haven’t been using a Mac long enough ;) ).
Admittedly my list of feeds is a bit bloated (typically I have between 1000-2000 unread items, which I have no doubt is actually a comparatively small number by Tom Smith’s standards).
However, I’ve found NetNewsWire to be slow, crash-prone (although definitely improved with the 2.1 os upgrade, so maybe we can blame Apple for that one), and generally not very smart about the way it works.
On the whole I think I prefer the NewsGator iPhone site, which essentially does the same job in a browser - but only because it gets me there quicker, not because the interface is necessarily better (in some ways it is worse).
In the unlikely event that Brent Simmons is reading this, here’s my quick fire list of how you could improve NNW on the iPhone:
allow me to order my list of feeds; alphabetical is so not how I want to read my news
give me a way to read the previous item; sometime I click “next” too soon…
update the unread counts quickly; surely you can cache the list of unread items on the server and download them first, before refreshing the actual articles?
fetch stuff from the feeds that are empty first; I have a few feeds I read a lot, and a lot of feeds I read rarely. The rare feeds already have tons of unread stuff in them. The popular feeds are empty, because I’ve sucked ‘em dry! Refresh those ones first please.
fetch the articles in a more just-in-time manner; I know this may be trickier given the format of feeds, but it ought to be possible to just start by fetching one or two articles, then get the next one whilst I’m reading, and so on. I often seems like I’m waiting a long time just to find out if there’s anything to read
be a bit smarter about moving on to the next feed or category; I have a bunch of Mac related feeds grouped together into a folder - I often find myself moved on to another folder, only to go back and discover that somehow a bunch of unread items in the Mac folder got skipped
mix things up a bit; off the top of my head I can’t remember whether the feed formats give dates per item, or just an update time for the feed, but I’d quite like to view a bunch of related feeds together in a mixed up order; in other words, it would be quite nice not to have to read all the Register articles, then Slashdot ones, then the TUAW ones, etc - juble them together a bit, sorted by posting date if possible
spot and remove duplicates; sometimes I end up with the same story twice because I subscribe to a main feed and a filtered version of it. It would be good if NNW could spot the duplicates and mark them as read for me