I'm very excited to let you know that a project we've been working very hard on here at NewsGator, called TapLynx, has officially gone live!  What is TapLynx, you ask?

TapLynx is a powerful iPhone frame work that allows you to:

• rapidly develop iPhone apps without learning Cocoa
• lower development and support costs
• monetize your apps through sponsorships, ads, & download fees

Now you can download the TapLynx SDK for free to evaluate whether or not it's the right option to enable you to launch content-rich, RSS-based based iPhone apps easily and quickly without having to learn Cocoa.  

If you head over to the TapLynx site, you'll be able to learn how to create social iPhone apps that can contain photos, video, audio, and more!  

So, check out TapLynx today!

Since all of our widgets here at NewsGator are powered by RSS, we're continually staying abreast of changes related to all things RSS.  One of those changes is the advent of a federated distribution model for RSS.

As Dave Winer over at RSSCloud.org rightly says, "In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step. That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought..."  He says this in reference to the fact that up until recently, the idea of instantaneous RSS updates (instead of the current "push/pull" method) was not fully banked.

But NewsGator is looking into cool new things that are developing in the RSS space, and at the moment we've got our eyes on the promise of instantaneous RSS updates via a federated distribution model. 

There are two different options we're following: Winer's RSSCloud and Google's interestingly-named Pubsubhubbub.  Though both are still in their early stages, they are both attempting to address basically the same issue.

In the future, we'll probably end up supporting both -- which would be a benefit to both the owners and end users of NewsGator-powered widgets.

A part of NewsGator that's less obvious than our enterprise social computing products, RSS readers, and widgets is our data services. In short, at NewsGator we want to know what people think about content. For example, without being overly intrusive (we don’t collect any personal information), we can track what people are reading, watching and responding to. We like to infer from implicit iteraction what people think about the different stories they read, the videos they watch , what they share with friends and what just gets passed on without notice.

Throughout the millions of NewsGator desktop clients, mobile applications and widgets, NewsGator is watching the content that people read, and keeping track of their interactions around that content. If you click on a headline to read a full article or click a play button in a video widget that tells us the content is interesting. If you email it, rate it, mark it read in NetNewsWire or clip it in FeedDemon, all of these events represent varying levels of attention around a story.

The aggregate collection of these attention events loosely represents the reach and interaction of content, and are represented in two calculated scores:

• Post Score: this is a metric that represents the activity around a particular piece of content. There is no limit or range applied, larger numbers represent more attention

• Feed Score: since each feed is made up of individual articles, the feedscore is generated based on the strength of the individual articles in the feed. We also layer in the subscriber count to that feed, making the feedscore not just about the activity, but also the reach of the source. This metric also does not fit into a range; larger numbers simply mean more activity and more subscribers

To learn more about NewsGator's data services, click here.

I wanted to let you know that we've made a data sheet to give you more information on NewsGator's forthcoming iPhone Media App Framework, TapLynx.  We hope that this will provide you with a clearer picture of what this product is all about.

We are also working on a white paper with even more details on TapLynx features, functionality, pricing, etc.  We hope to release this in the near future. 

Right now we are putting the finishing touches on TapLynx, and want to make sure that the SDK is perfect before we let you use it, so its release has been pushed back just a bit to August. 

We think it will be well worth your wait!  You can access the data sheet here, or click on the image below.

This past weekend, the folks over at ReadWriteWeb profiled TapLynx.

Their lede:

"Have you ever wanted to create an iPhone app, but can't code your way out of a wet paper bag? Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader will have to wait a little longer for the next version of that application because its creator, Brent Simmons, has been busy working on a new iPhone framework called TapLynx. The goal of TapLynx is to help users generate topic-focused media applications for the iPhone without any programming required. The first application, created by Simmons, has already been built for All Things Digital."

You can access their entire preview here.

Behind the scenes, things are moving forward with our new iPhone application framework, TapLynx.  As I mentioned in the previous post, we now have a splash page up for the framework, and you can sign up for the SDK, which we hope to begin sending out by mid-July.

We'll also be releasing a white paper at the end of this month which will, hopefully, answer a lot of the questions you have about this exciting new offering.  Until then, I thought I'd post what NewsGator's Brent Simmons (creator of NetNewsWire for iPhone) has to say about TapLynx, since his explanation is simple and succinct:

"The idea behind TapLynx is that you can take a collection of feeds and some artwork, make choices about colors and gradients and behavior (all in a configuration file you edit), then create an iPhone app. Without doing any programming.

But you can do programming if you want to — use TapLynx as the base and add more features. (In fact, that’s what I’m doing with NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone — it’s a custom app built on TapLynx.)"

Once again, you can sign up to the the SDK here, and we'll let you know as soon as it's available.  Thanks!

I'm delighted to introduce to you TapLynx, NewsGator's iPhone Media App Framework!  We have designed TapLynx to allow agencies, developers and designers to quickly and easily build content-rich iPhone apps with almost no effort. (TapLynx was used to build the recent All Things Digital App as well as the Variety.com App and is the same framework behind our proven and award-winning NetNewsWire for iPhone.)

With TapLynx, you can rapidly develop your own customizable and unique iPhone apps, and there's no need to learn Cocoa or deal with messy code.  We take are of all of it for you.  Sound too good to be true?  It's not.

Who is TapLynx for?

• Agencies: create & develop iPhone apps quickly & easily
• Developers: build apps without the need to learn Cocoa
• Designers: create apps from start to finish without any code

Check out TapLynx today and get our SDK!

More information on this exciting new offering will be forthcoming...

If you haven't already checked out the iPhone app that NewsGator built for All Things Digital -- which I covered previously on this blog -- then I urge you to!  Since its launch, it has received a lot of coverage and interest.

For instance, Dan Frommer of Business Daily says,

"...the app itself is clean and quick. It doesn't lurch around like some other content-heavy apps. (It's built on the NewsGator platform, and is basically a branded RSS reader/Web search engine.) And it includes some neat bonus features, like the ability to send an article from the app out on Twitter or Facebook."

For a neat demo of the app in action, check out this YouTube video.

Need any convincing how cool and simple to use this application is?  Even a 3 year old -- nephew of NewsGator's Brent Simmons (who is responsible for much of NewsGator's iPhone app framework) -- can use it!

You can download the free All Things Digital app here.