mReader
Mark's Plasma running on Nokia 7210 emulator.

What is it?

mReader is a light-weight Mobile RSS Reader (Aggregator) designed to be compatible with J2ME midp devices including Mobile Phones, PDAs and Blackberry. RSS is a format of storing information on a particular topic and is used by many individuals and companies for many purposes, including, but not limited to personal weblogs, news headlines, product information and updates.

Bringing the ability to read RSS feeds to mobile devices was a logical step in the evolution of information deployment. Using mReader you can get information delivered in RSS form from any location so long as your wireless device can obtain a connection.

Please note that mReader is designed to be a light-weight RSS Reader for mobile devices and does not currently contain any functionality for allowing the persistance of downloaded information between mReader sessions other than the storage of Feeds (Feed names and URLs), or any other type of offline mode (ie viewing of information downloaded from a PC). There are other products on the market that satisfy offline information viewing already. Due to the limitations of various J2ME Virtual Machines this functionality will most likely not see the light of day in a J2ME implementation.

Features

  • Import feed lists from OPML files stored on the web. OPML files contain collections of RSS sources and can be generated by many of the current crop of desktop RSS news aggregators.
  • Using generic feed handling, can view a wide variety of RSS formats including all RSS versions, RDF, with the potential to support new formats with ease.
  • Caching of last accessed post information within the same mReader session. (If you accidently leave a feed, it won't be redownloaded)
  • Smart UI, allowing you to do more with less clicks. (UI changes between devices so this is device dependant)
  • Formatting of Basic HTML commands and &..; commands (including ASCII character versions, for example  )
  • Uses the kXML2 XML parsing library for J2ME

How to get it

Sun Java2 Micro Edition programs are distributed using a standard jar file which is then run by the J2ME Virtual Machine. You can download the required files individually (Jad and Jar file, although most of the time the Jar file is all you will need) and load them onto your device manually (How to load these files to your device is dependant on the tool provided with your device). If you are use your mobile device to download software using Over The Air (OTA) deployment then you can point your mobile device's web browser to my mobile homepage and select the mReader 1.01 link from there.

Download Individual Files

Version 1.01 - mReader.jad, mReader.jar
Version 1.0 (Initial Release) - mReader.jar

OTA Deployment

Point mobile device to http://mobile.markallanson.net/

Feedback

If you have any feedback on mReader, please direct it to me via email.