For iOS users.  Right now you cannot download from the Apple store until they do the next javascript update.  If you want it now, set your phone to ‘developer mode‘ and then download the file.  Download NewsSnacker here.

Update 1:  The link finally showed up in the App store.  However, if you search NewsSnacker, it will not find it, but if you search twitter + news it finds it!  Odd eh?

https://apps.getpebble.com/applications/540fa3a2df71d3eb2e000021

Future plans:

• Currently I have 5 news sources; however I may add a few more.
• Offer custom twitter lists for $1.99 a year.  Basically you tell me what you want to see and I’ll code it up.
• Tap on your watch and get the first ~300 words of the story. Expand to ~900 later.
• Click ‘save to read later’.  Not sure how I will go about this yet.
• Thoughts????  Open to suggestions.

NewsSnacker.com

Web browsing on the iphone is a good enough experience with one exception.. ok, 2 exceptions.  The iphone’s browser crashing on me is a bit annoying, but that is another post.  So back to 1 thing.  When I open new pages, normally from clicking on a link, and then try to go back to the original page, more often then not, the original page is forced to reload. For example, I use newsSnacker.com to read the latest news from twitter.  Fast and timely.  If there is something interesting I want to read, I click on the link and it opens a new window. Now if I want to go back to newsSnacker, I sometimes have to reload the page. Quite annoying when it takes time to reload the page AND have to scroll back to where I left off AND if I lost connection, which happens, especially on the subway I lose it altogether.  A really simple fix for this would be to save the web page locally. Can’t do that. At least not completely.  So, here is a little trick I use to save pages for later reading.

When you open a new page, press and hold over an empty space on the web page within the text.  This will bring up the copy option and select all of the text. Copy the text and paste it into the notebook.  For some reason, this does not work on all sites, so in those cases, select 1 word, get the copy controls up and then manually select all of the text.

Unless you have backgrounder, once you pasted your text into the notepad and return to the browser, it will refresh, so you want to do this while you still have good wireless access.  So I’ll spend a few min before I get on the subway (BART) and load up a few stories I might like to read.  Same thing if I’m a passenger in a car about to go on a long drive or entry the many cell pergatory spots we have here in SF. Once I sit down to read to read the stories, they are all saved and I can go from story to story with no problems.

There are other solutions out there, but so far, instapaper seems to be the only other clean solution, however, setup is a pain. At some point, I’ll write a follow up to this and review instapaper.