New In The App Store: Gazette
By 
The native iPhone/iPod Touch RSS reader landscape is becoming increasingly crowded. It seems that at least one new RSS reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch is release each night. Yesterday was no exception and one of the new RSS readers, Gazette, caught my eye.
Priced at just $2.99, Gazette syncs with your Google Reader account. In this regard it stands as a direct competitor with, for example, Byline and the new, and free, Doppler.
How does it stack up???
The initial impression Gazette gives is that of another stripped-down (read- “all but useless”) RSS reader. That is anything but the case.
Gazette’s user interface strikes a nice balance between “simple and clean“ and ”full featured“. Even with dozens of feeds, Gazette maintains its clean appearance by providing full support for any folders you may have created in Google Reader. You can star an article for latter access, share a post, email it to someone else or open it in Safari- all with the touch of a button. In addition, Gazette provides one touch access to your previously shared and starred posts, as well as any notes you may have previously created.
More importantly, Gazette provides offline access when no network is available and then pushes any changes you have made to Google Reader when one does become available.
I should note that Gazette does not allows for landscape viewing of posts and was a bit unstable, having crashed more than once during an initial sync. After rebooting my iPhone, however, it seemed to work fine.
So what do I think?
Were this a few days ago I would be recommending Gazette without hesitation!
Unfortunately for Gazette’s developers, this isn’t a few days ago. Byline is now in version 2. It looks great, offers all of Gazette’s functionality and more (including landscape) and is rock solid. All that, combined with a price drop to $3.99, makes Byline the overwhelming winner if you want an RSS reader that works with Google Reader.
You can get Gazette HERE in the App Store.
