Editor’s Note: One of the things that I love about having guest bloggers joining us here at the Daily App is that they have been a huge help in identifying interesting, creative apps that merit review. Today, Steve Litchfield, from All About Symbian, brings us his perspective on a new RSS reader app called Headlines. Read on to see why he thinks this apps holds huge potential …

Every so often, an application comes along that grabs the imagination. It doesn’t necessarily have to do something totally new, it doesn’t actually have to do something better. It simply has to make you stop and think to appreciate its content by the manner of its display.

And this is where Headlines comes in. Most people are aware of the ‘geeky’ concept of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feed readers, but don’t go away just yet … we promise this is good stuff – Headlines by Mind-Flip aims to get away from entering long RSS addresses and scrolling through long, boring textual headlines. The Headlines app, while limited in raw functionality, brings you plenty of eye candy and user-friendliness.

Typically, a RSS news item from a site might comprise a headline, a bit of body text (usually the opening paragraph of the full story) and a link to an appropriate small image. Rather than have all your feeds and items listed chronologically, as is traditional with a bare bones feed reader, Headlines (as the name suggests) just displays the titles (headlines) and images, laying them out in a side-scrolling ‘magazine’ format.

This video from the developers shows Headlines in action:

The idea is that you can scroll left to right to see more headlines from your chosen feed, and up and down to scroll to other news feeds. And you know what? It all works rather well – it’s an innovative way to see at a glance what’s happening in the world (or in your chosen sphere of information) and to be able to browse through the initial text behind each headline. Once in the story view, left and right icons let you move quickly between stories from the same feed.

You’ll notice when you first start Headlines that the gathering of feeds and the downloading of story thumbnail graphics takes (up to) a few tens of seconds – you obviously don’t want this delay every time you return to the application and want to refresh your chosen news feeds. Headlines cleverly auto-refreshes these in the background, even waiting for a moment when you’re not using your phone so that its activity doesn’t slow down or interfere with anything else you’re doing. The basic auto-refresh period is a simple setting, as shown here, but in addition to waiting an extra short period for the phone to be idle, Headlines also delays a refresh while a story’s detail view is in the ‘foreground’, in case you left it there so as to remember to read it or follow it later. Clever stuff.

All of which sounds idyllic, but there are some significant caveats to this eye candy vision of RSS heaven, each of which needs to be fully understood. Firstly, and most significantly, RSS news feeds aren’t some perfectly curated affair – what goes into a site’s RSS feed is entirely up to the feed’s owner. Some put in just a bare headline and two lines of text, others go the whole hog, with complete articles posted to the feed, complete with original images. And everything in between. Headlines comes pre-populated with a couple of feeds and has a dozen more listed behind a ‘Recommended’ pane, and I gather there has been some effort made to find feeds that include a sensible amount of detail and compatible imagery – but there will still be some experimentation required at your end.

Secondly, going along with the ‘all RSS feeds aren’t created equal’ theme, many will resolve to a high bandwidth desktop site. In other words, you’ll read the first paragraph of a story and want to read more. At this point, you’re utterly dependent on the original address of the story on the web and the intelligence (or otherwise) of the web server involved. Headlines launches your mobile Web browser and you’re possibly sent into a thirty second wait while the page is downloaded and rendered. It’s certainly not Headlines’ fault, but it’s very much something to be aware of.

Thirdly, Headlines is limited to just three RSS feeds. Yep, just three. I’d love to say that this is by design, in that you’re encouraged to find just the three best news sources for your own interests and then treat Headlines as a quick way to scan right across these, without getting distracted by a dozen other sources – but that would be untrue. The current limit is a technical one (it’s complicated and memory-related) and the developer is working on finding a solution. As a way to visually scan my top three feeds, I still found Headlines to fulfil its remit, but every user, at some point, is going to want to browse a fourth, or fifth, and so on.

Finally, there’s no way, at present, to enter new feed addresses. Headlines uses a feed directory, hosted at ‘RSS Mountain’ and this will already know the magic runes for most RSS sources you might want to enter, but again there will come a time when it would be handy to plug in an address for a specialist (or very new) feed – here’s hoping this feature can be added in a future version too.

I’ve been quite impressed by the way I can switch to Headlines at any point and know that the content is bang up to date (remember, it’s all refreshed in the background, as long as you keep the application running). I can quickly scan headlines (pun intended) both in terms of text and images – the usual cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words comes to mind. In thirty seconds, I can scroll left, right, up and down and get an overview of what’s happening in the world. With three minutes to spare, I can delve into the detail view and then tap through each story summary in turn, making my overview a lot more detailed.

Headlines certainly isn’t perfect and the variations in RSS feed quality are often also a problem, but with a slicker application promised (I was reviewing v1.1.0) and better curation of the ‘Recommended’ feed list in the future, I’m optimistic that this is a tool that’s going to be popular.

Headlines is available for $0.99 (USD) in Ovi Store.

About the Guest Blogger

Steve Litchfield is one of the editors at All About Symbian, and the creator of The Phones Show. You can follow him on Twitter @stevelitchfield.