I used to love using AvantGo to load up my Palm with the latest news stories from across the Web, so that I could read them on the bus. Now I don’t carry a Palm with me wherever I go, but I do tote my iPod along almost all the time.
So I have to ask: why hasn’t anyone created a utility that can be aimed at various web pages or RSS feeds and grab their contents, convert them into plain-text format, and drop ’em in the Notes folder of an iPod? Yes, it would require some clever page-scraping, and yes, it would require intelligent splitting and hyperlinking of stories using the bare-bones coding format that the iPod understands.
But still, it shouldn’t be that difficult. While there are some RSS browsers out there for the iPod, they don’t thrill me, because most RSS feeds don’t include the full text of news stories. And I don’t know of any RSS tool for the iPod that actually downloads the contents of the page referenced by the RSS entry. I want to read more than headlines on my iPod; I want to read the whole article!
So, developers, someone want to pick up the challenge and make an awesome news-syncing app for the iPod?
(Thanks to Macworld intern Cyrus Farivar for the suggestion.)