Do You Find Websites Hard To Read On The iPhone? Try FeedTouch

After the first few weeks of using an iPhone, I learned that reading the content of most websites on a mobile phone was such an unpleasant experience. The texts were tiny and hard to read, the ads were distracting, I kept having to zoom in and out, scroll vertically and horizontally. In short, I spent most of the time trying to navigate the content instead of reading the content.

I know there are already some solutions out there that somewhat tackle this problem, but none of them is simple enough to my liking. So that’s why I wrote FeedTouch. (Note: even if there’s a simpler solution that I didn’t know of, I’d still write it anyway :p)

To use FeedTouch, all you have to do is add ft.t00.me in front of a website URL. The screen shot below shows a normal website on the left http://ma.tt, and the FeedTouch-ed version on the right http://ft.t00.me/ma.tt .

FeedTouch automatically discovers an atom or RSS feed on a website (most news sites and blogs have such feeds). But instead of showing the content included in the feed (many feeds only provide excerpts), FeedTouch shows you the full content in a readable format.

I understand that this is not a solution for everyone. FeedTouch is particularly useful for me because I mostly read news sites with fresh daily content and I mostly do the reading during my daily train commute, which means I only care about reading stuffs, I never run out of reading material, and I’m not worried about keeping track which articles I have or have not read. And after some time, I ended up with a folder containing a collection of the FeedTouch-ed websites that I read most often, I added those sites to my iPhone home screen.

I know some of you might ask “What’s wrong with Google Reader?” Two things. First is that Google Reader only displays the content included in the feed. I like to read NBA.com and I only get few sentences worth of excerpt on their feed, which means I ended up having to visit the actual web page with the hard to read texts anyway. And second, adding new feeds to Google Reader on iPhone’s Safari is not simple enough because it involves finding out the feed URL (good luck with that) and copy-pasting it to Google Reader, plus, using a web form on a mobile phone is such a pain.

I would rather simply add ft.t00.me in front of a website URL and let FeedTouch discover the feed URL automatically for me. If I like the website content, then I simply add it to the iPhone home screen. Easy!

FeedTouch uses jQueryMobile, and mashes up Google Feed with ViewText.

Update (26/07/2011): replaced ft.prn.la with ft.t00.me .

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