Saturday! Saturday! Saturday! One day only! You may buy the whole app -- but you'll only need the edge.

Sorry about that. Nevertheless, Byline -- Phantom Fish's flagship Google Reader app and offline browser -- is on sale Saturday only for $1.99. (It goes back to its regular price, $4.99, on July 12.) Not only that, but the first 40 people to forward their sale-price receipt to birthday@phantomfish.com will receive a promo code that entitles them to a free second copy of Byline for a friend.

We've covered Byline before here at TUAW, and version 2.5 includes speed and caching improvements, a spiffy new dark interface, and matching new icon.

In celebration of the App Store's anniversary, Sophiestication Software is also offering 75 percent discounts to their two apps: Groceries (a shopping list app) and Tipulator (a tip calculator) at 99 cents apiece. Both apps are available in the App Store.

Edovia is also offering its six products (Rocket Taxi, Linguo, NumPad, Steps, Find Me!, and Currencies) for 99 cents apiece, down from $1.99. All these are also available in the App Store, as you might imagine.

Have you found more sweet deals today? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Google Reader is unarguably an extremely popular RSS news reader with a very good mobile interface for the iPhone. But as good as the mobile interface is, for me well done native applications will always beat an in-browser experience. A good iPhone app that synchronizes with Google Reader already exists by the name of Byline ($4.99, iTunes link), but a new one has just been released that is worth your attention.

I used Byline for a few months before finally tiring of not having the ability to unsubscribe from feeds that I'd lost interest in. In fact, I switched to NetNewsWire (free, iTunes link) on the Newsgator platform for just that reason. But this new RSS reader has come along with not only the ability to synchronize with Google Reader, but also the ability to manage my Google Reader subscriptions right on my iPhone. This new (to me, anyway) app is called Feeds ($2.99, iTunes link).

Phantom Fish and CoolLittleThings have teamed up to give away 42 copies of both Byline and BlogPress. If you buy one app, you win a chance to get the other for free.

Three winners will be chosen every day beginning the 18th, and ending on the 31st. The promotion is available to anyone who purchases either Byline or BlogPress between today and the end of the year.

Depending on which app you buy, you must email a copy of your iTunes receipt to the app's publisher to be entered into the contest. Full details and instructions are available on both the Phantom Fish and CoolLittleThings websites.

Byline is a Google Reader client and offline browser for the iPhone, which I reviewed in October. It's available for $4.99 in the App Store.

BlogPress is an easy-to-use WYSIWYG blog editor that supports all the maintream blogging platforms, including Blogger, WordPress and Movable Type. It's also available for $4.99 in the App Store.

On Tuesday, Phantom Fish released an update to Byline, its Google Reader-slash-offline browser app for iPhone and iPod touch.

Byline's developer, Milo Bird, has been hard at work since Byline 1.0 was released, making improvements to the app based on his users' feedback. Last week, Milo took some time out of his vacation to New York to sit down with us (virtually) and talk about Byline and the app development process.

Does Google make it easy to develop an app that interfaces with Google Reader?

Yes and no. The API for accessing Google Reader is straightforward and well-designed, so from a practical point of view it's quite pleasant to work with. However, it's not formally supported by Google, so there's no official documentation. The API has been around for years now and is in use by a large number of third-party apps, so there are several sources of unofficial documentation, but working out the nuances does involve fumbling around in the dark a bit.

Phantom Fish yesterday updated Byline to version 2.0, adding functionality to browse by tag, and a spiffy new wood-grain interface.

I briefly reviewed Byline 1.0 in July, but wanted to re-visit the application after the update. Byline 2.0 is a Google Reader client and offline browser for the iPhone and iPod touch. After having used beta versions for the last few weeks, I can say with certainty that this update takes Byline head and shoulders above the first version.

Byline 2.0 is faster than both version 1.0 and Google Reader's MobileSafari-optimized interface. Articles are now grouped in folders according to tags you've already set up in Google Reader. You can mark whole folders of items as read, and save items to your phone by starring them. The app doesn't show a splash screen at startup, but instead a "blank" version of the interface, which gives the illusion that the app is hanging for a short period of time. As soon as the list of folders appears, however, loading items was zippy on my iPod touch (connected via WiFi, of course).

As someone who manages whole metric scads of information in Google Reader, I was excited to see Byline, from Phantom Fish software, in the App Store.

Byline, as you might expect, fetches all your subscriptions from Google Reader and displays them for you to read. It also keeps track of the items you've read and starred.

The greatest thing, though, especially for iPod touch owners and subway riders is this: Starring or Noting an item saves it on your iPhone or iPod for offline reading. If you star an item either using your desktop browser, Mobile Safari, or Byline itself, it saves it for later. Noting an item is even better, because you can save pages that aren't even in your RSS subscriptions for offline reading with Byline. They mention you can do this very easily with a bookmarklet.

Now -- I can hear you screaming: NetNewsWire does all this, and it's free! Without boring you with detail, it's worth ten bucks to me to keep my Google Reader workflow the way it is, rather than spending time changing the way I work. Agreed: it's probably too steep for people who aren't heavily invested in Google Reader already.

Additionally on the downside, Byline doesn't allow you to browse by tag, instead opting to lump everything together in one list by date. Phantom Fish says this is for performance reasons, as people with many feeds would experience sluggish behavior. They're looking into it, though, and I personally hope they figure it out.

Byline is $9.99, awesome, and available through the App Store.