Now that I’m cleared maritally for iPhone ownership and plan to purchase one it seems I must make some effort to prepare. No, I will not be picking one up today. As it is now being treated as a standard phone and subject to the vagaries of phone subsidization I just cannot justify the expenditure of 200 extra dollars. My current plan allows for a discounted upgrade on September 29, 2008. Conveniently, this is one day after my birthday. The coincidence of this date does wonders to alleviate the pain of not being able to snatch one up immediately after over a year of waiting.

My preparations are rather long-term, actually.

It became apparent to me that I would have to consider the manner in which I read RSS feeds once I added a device like the iPhone. Some time back I chose NewsFire as my desktop RSS reader. I still stand by the choice purely based on design aesthetics alone. Everything in NewsFire is big, friendly, colorful, and obvious. It’s perfectly Apple-esque inasmuch as it does what it’s supposed to do without a lot of cruft. I’d recommend it to anyone and particularly to anyone new to RSS. It’s a wonderful program, but NetNewsWire has a huge ace in the hole: syncing.

NetNewsWire’s feeds can be painlessly and instantaneously synced to the web through a free web account available at newsgator.com. News items you read on any device — Mac, PC, iPhone, or web — will be marked as read on any other device. It’s all in that “cloud” you’ve heard so much about. I hear the newly released iPhone client is pretty damned good too.

So last I began in earnest to switch over. I could have imported my list of feeds from NewsFire in OPML format, but I deigned not to in order to weed out the less frequently read feeds. There were an awful lot of things I’d subscribed to and read almost never.

My first reaction was not entirely pleasant. NetNewsWire has a very staid, workmanlike appearance. It looks rather like an email client, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but NewsFire is just so different.

I’m warming up to it very quickly though. It has some serious power under the hood, power I’ll likely never fully tap. For instance, in addition to the standard feed subscriptions, folders, and smart folders NetNewsWire allows a set of “Special Subscriptions” that allow the ad hoc construction of subscriptions to a search engine query, a local folder, a particular tag, or even a script. I will probably never figure out how to best use that functionality.

But the best feature of NetNewsWire I wasn’t expecting is the support of user-created stylesheets. This affords a phenomenal level of granular control of the way news posts are displayed. These are much more than simple CSS. They support JavaScript (if enabled in the Preferences) which, in the right hands, transforms raw XML into some of the best looking websites I’ve ever seen. In many cases the text visible in NetNewsWire is actually better looking than it is on the site from which it is derived. It ships with a bunch, and there’s a list of more user-created styles. I recommend the Ollicle Reflex and Bullit styles.

Forget “iReady,” this is how I prepare for iPhone.