Grr for the N900

I'm a simple man with simple needs. The Nokia N900 is awesome. There is a huge body of people developing cool applications for Maemo 5, the N900's operating system. In fact, I only have a few problems, none of them very large problems.

For instance, there's no Shazam app for the N900. I used that program all the time on my old phone to identify music in restaurants and on the radio.

You can't have multiple ringtones on the N900, for instance giving each contact a custom ringtone. Not a big deal, but still odd that the N900 doesn't allow it. In fact, that feature is so common in all phones now, it's not even anything I thought to investigate when researching the N900.

The biggest problem for me was reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. I love Google Reader. On my pc. The interface is a little hard to use on the tiny N900 screen, and using the iPhone's mobile Google Reader interrface doesn't sort feeds by web site, nor does it act at all like I want it to.

This was a problem, and I have even been evaluating other web-based feed readers for a better mobile interface, when I read about Grr.

Grr is an app that brings your Google Reader feeds to your N900. The above link explains where to find it and how to install it. It doesn't have support for marking posts with stars or for sharing items, but I don't use those features anyway.

The best things about Grr, which I hope never change, are:

-It sorts feeds by site.
-It's easy to mark all the posts of a site as read.
-You can choose to view all feeds and entries whether they've been read or not.
-You can easily open a post in your default browser to read or view it there.

That's it. That's all I needed. I told you I was a simple man...

So thank you, developer(s) of Grr, for a simple app that's exactly what I wanted.

David