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Well I have been thinking about what features the RSS Reader tutorial should cover and I have also been getting some requests from readers (if anyone else has a request please feel free to send them through or tweet them to me).

I have come up with the following list of features and how we will be implementing them.

1. Store and retrieve RSS Feeds from a SQLite Database

We will be storing our feed details in a SQLite database and then caching the feed items in a local SQLite database once they are downloaded, this will also allow us to mark when articles have been read and also to have a favourite tab (more on this later). We will also be storing an image (favicon) in the SQLite database as a BLOB.

2. Feed Grouping and Table Drilldown

As I follow a large number of bloggers I like to be able to group my feeds into their topic or other groupings, this will also allow me to show you how to do UITableView drilldown with a single view controller. This will also go into a bit more info on SQLite and how to dynamically set a UITableViews source information.

3. UIActionView to add RSS feed / Feed Group

This was one thing that I thought would be a nice touch, I see many people asking how to get this to work on other blogs so I thought I would include it for your enjoyment

4. TouchXML to process RSS feeds

TouchXML is a 3rdParty library that makes manipulating and traversing XML documents a breeze, we will be using it to grab our RSS feeds and transcode them for storing in our SQLite database.

5. Integrated UIWebView

I have had many, many requests from readers for a tutorial on integrating a UIWebView with a blog reader to provide the all-in-one solution for your blog reading needs!

6. Custom Cell Renderer

Another thing that I see pop up often is requests for a tutorial on creating custom cell renderers for UITableViews, I will go through the process for creating custom cells in code.

7. UITabBarController

Originally I was just going to use a navigation controller and make the application pretty basic, but once I got all the feature requests through I realised that we would need more navigation options, I decided to use a UITabBar and Navigation Controller. This will mean a little adjustment to the “Part 2″ tutorial, but I will go back in the next installment and cover that.

8. Core Location

I have been trying to think of a way to integrate Core Location into this app, in reality there isn’t a huge need for Core Location in a RSS Reader application but I really wanted get it in there somehow…I have decided to make a server-side PHP script that will allow you to find blogs that people close to you are, don’t really know how useful it is but it will go over the basics of CoreLocation and integrating with a remote web-service.

9. What Next?

If anyone has any more feature requests them feel free to fling them my way, once this app is complete it will be submitted to the app store and hopefully approved. The full source code will be freely available for you to modify and hack up as much as you want.

In the next part we will dive into the code and start getting something running in our simulator.

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