President Obama is well known to be a Blackberry user, but yesterday his administration released the official The White House app and you will only find it in the iTunes App Store. The app essentially takes the content from the (very nice) official white house website and formats it for the iPhone.
The app includes content from the somewhat informal White House Blog, official statements from the Newsroom such as transcripts of the President's speeches and archived photos and videos.
My initial reaction to an iPhone app that repackages the content from a website is usually lukewarm. For any news or blog format website that has an RSS feed, I find it far more efficient to use a single news reader app to collect all of the RSS feeds in one place. (I currently use NetNewsWire, which works with Google Reader.) But the White House website has a ton of content and it is nice to have it all nicely organized in a single app, especially since the website is so packed that it doesn't display as well on the iPhone as some other sites do. Plus, the video on the website requires Adobe Flash and thus does not play on the iPhone, whereas the video in the iPhone app plays quite well.
The iPhone app also includes an interesting Live button that will let you stream selected events as they happen. Right now there are two events scheduled, a town hall address tomorrow afternoon and the State of the Union speech on January 27, 2010.
Politicians are always looking for ways to reach out to their constituents, and this is clearly a good thing. We ought to have easy opportunities to keep in touch with our elected officials. Many iPhone owners will download this app just because it is free and we always love to try out the latest apps, but I hope that a lot of people keep this one on their iPhone and fire it up from time to time as another way to check the pulse of what is going on in Washington. Informed readers will also want to get their news from trusted journalists, but this is a nice supplement. Indeed, I've been very impressed with this administration's use of technology to keep in touch with Americans, from the nice website to an active Twitter feed to the gorgeous and fascinating photographs displayed on the White House photostream on Flickr (which, by the way, I encourage you to check out immediately if you haven't seen it before; I'm not sure if these were all taken by the official White House photographer Pete Souza, who also took pictures for President Reagan, but they are amazing pictures).
Click here for The White House (free):