Tips for using iPod touch with Twitter, Gmail and RSS feeds

I’ve been using my iPod touch a great deal lately. It’s summer holidays here and I’ve had more opportunity to lie in bed and listen to music or podcasts, to watch video podcasts, to check emails, tweets and RSS feeds with the device. Here are some useful things I’ve learned.

I keep these 3 web pages open all the time so I can call them up whenever I want.

NewsGator mobile RSS feeds

The mobile version of NewsGator works well for reading RSS feeds on the iPod. I use NetNewsWire (NNW) on both my main Macs, synced via NewsGator Online Premium Package (it came free with NNW). That means I can read RSS feeds on either Mac or the iPod, using NetNewsWire or a web interface, and all machines know what I have and haven’t read.

The screenshots show the list of feeds, an abbreviated item, and the full item. Click for a larger view.

While I find the usual (computer) web interface much clumsier than a slick program such as NNW, the mobile edition interface on the iPod is excellent. The list of feeds shows only feeds that have unread items, with the number of unread beside each. Tap a feed or folder to see a list of items, with a few words of text for each. Tap ‘[more]‘ to see the rest of the post, ‘Read’ or ‘Clip’ as relevant, or ‘Page Read’, or ‘Next’ and ‘All Read’ as required, or just return to the list of ‘Feeds’ if you don’t want to mark items read.

PocketTweets for Twitter on the iPod

Twitterrific is an excellent bit of Mac software, but on the iPod touch what you want is PocketTweets. It has a clear, simple look with avatars, and allows you to enter updates too.

PocketTweets was built from the ground up to support Apple’s new phone platform.

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The screenshots show the list of emails, a specific email, some More choices, and the Customize menu. Click for a larger view.

Use Gmail for email

These days I use Google Apps for my FirstBite domain name. That gives me the power of Gmail. On my Macs I actually use the web interface, backed up with occasional fetches into Apple Mail on one machine. On the iPod touch I mainly just read and delete (or sometimes archive) new emails.

I avoid writing emails on the iPod touch — without copy and paste, typing shortcuts and so on, typing’s a bit tedious.

Aside: FirstBite on the iPod touch often comes out as FirstBore — hmmmm.

Again, I use the mobile version of Gmail. You can customise the views — I restrict mine to the InBox and a label ‘Today’. I call up the InBox, tap a specific email to read it, scroll as required and then either tap Delete or InBox. Occasionally I chose More and perhaps mark the message as Unread or assign a Star.

Update: April 2009: now I use Tweetie: Use Tweetie for Twitter on the iPod touch, iPhone and Mac.