I’m a bit of a newsgroup junkie; at least when it comes to developing software with Delphi. I’ve also had an iPhone for a couple of years and one thing I miss when I’m not at my MacBook is being having a news (NNTP) client. So, over the past few months (on and off), I’ve been working on a news client for iOS. Part of the reason is to learn more about developing iOS applications, since there’s already at least one decent NNTP client for iOS. For now, I’ve decided to go with the “i” meme (like iPod, iPhone etc) and name the client: iNews.

Developing iNews has brought together a number of the technologies available in Delphi “out of the box”, namely FireMonkey for the visual stuff (listviews, listboxes, switches etc), FireDAC for data access to a SQLite database, and Indy for the NNTP comms. The experience has included a number of challenges along the way. Some challenges were so great that at one point I was considering abandoning the project; mostly because it is a learning exercise and I was planning to give the app away for free (or perhaps include those annoying banner ads).

At the moment however, iNews’ future is looking brighter. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, however at present iNews compiles for Android (with Delphi XE5) without changing one line of code.

I’ll endeavour to have more posts soon about the progress of iNews, however for now, please enjoy a few screen shots of it running on iOS and Android. Please excuse the font sizes; I’ll be experimenting with different sizes later. Pictures of iNews on Android courtesy of David Clegg.

Android:

iOS: