Earlier this week someone asked me if I had ever created an app. My answer – nope, never had a reason to. But it got me thinking about it and serendipitously this morning on twitter I saw this:
Quickly Turn Your Blog Into an Android App with Feed.nu http://rww.to/dXuxtV
Sure its just a blog but and its a very simple app but it uses RSS so you could use it for anything that produces a feed. Event calendar anyone? So I went through the process to create my own app. You create an account a Feed.nu and it walks you through the process, basically enter your feed, upload some images and viola! You have a an Android app!
I made the logo and header by grabbing an image of my blog using the Lightshot Chrome extension, editing them in Paint.net saved them as .png because that’s the file type Feed.nu said it wanted.
Basically all together it took me maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Of course you could spend more time creating headers and logo images. The app can be downloaded from the website at http://librarianbyday.feed.nu/ (screenshots below) or I could spend the $25 to upload it to the Android Market to make it official.
How can libraries use this? Well most events calendars produce a feed. You an create an App for events or anything you’re producing an RSS feed for. Yes it only works on Android devices and it’s not as fancy as professionally developed apps such as the Boopsie one at San Jose Public Library or the DC library’s iPhone app.
But it was free and easy and I didn’t need to know any coding to create it and for many libraries without the funding or staff capable of creating one this is a great option.
There is the app logo! Second row left side.
First screen when you open the app. The header is a customizable.
Read items have the washed out RSS symbol next to them, unread have the LbD logo – these are customizable
It displays rather nicely I think.
You can’t leave a blog comment via the app but the links would and will take you to the sites by opening a web browser.
Librarian by Day 
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