Big Changes in Feeds Version 1.3
February 1, 2009 — Mike (admin)As always, Feeds development continues to be driven by user requests. The only unread items setting has been changed to affect all feeds. If you never want to see your read items again then just turn that to ON and your read items will vanish. We are currently testing the latest batch of updates. Below are two images highlighting the most significant updates.
The first image is of the feed item list. There is a new setting that will allow you to show a 2 line preview of your feed items. As always, the setting will be available in the Settings application on your Springboard once released. We have optimized this about as much as possible so it should work fine even when viewing 40 or more feeds per page.
A hidden change on this page is a new way to star, unstar, mark as read and even mark as unread right from the feed list. If we are going to give you a preview we felt you should be able to mark items as read that you don’t want to see anymore. Marking items as starred is just as easy. Here is a breakdown of what you can do from your feed list:
- Star/Unstar an item – swipe left to toggle the star for the current feed item (Google Reader only)
- Mark Read/Unread – swipe right to toggle the read status for the current feed item (Note: Marking as unread is a bit tricky. First off, it is only available for Google Reader users. Second, due to the way Google Reader works you can only mark an item as unread if you just marked it as read. You cannot go to an old item and mark it as unread. Feeds will mark your local copy as unread but it will not be unread when you login to Google Reader)
Next up is the feed details page. We changed the layout a bit to make for a more usable setup. The up/down arrows were moved to the bottom of the screen because they get used much more often than the share and star buttons. This should keep your hand out of the way when navigating your feed items.
We have a few more features coming up in a future revision. From there, we are going to take another few weeks to speed up and solidy all these changes. After that, we are going to start to be very careful about what we add. Feeds aims to be the most feature complete, user friendly feed reader out there. We do not want to bog down the application with so many features that you can’t just pick it up and use it with no instructions. At the same time, we want power users to feel at home with the application so we are walking the fine line as always.
UPDATE: From the looks of it InstaPaper is going to be popular enough to be worth adding so I just put it in. The way it will work is if you are on a description and you touch the ‘I’, the feed item’s permalink will go to InstaPaper. If you navigate to any page using the ‘View Page’ button and then touch the ‘I’, the current URL will be added to InstaPaper.
I was pleased to see in my RSS feed the screens for 1.3 with the 2 line preview, cool !!! A small question/comment – does the title line of the article (eg Re: non_lazy_ptr from static const & iPhone: Auto-rotation, multiple xibs entries on your screenshots) always take up 2 lines (it appears) of screen real estate, on a small screen anything saved is welcomed? Or will it collapse and be more like “How to start 2+ audio files” type look? Dunno if I asked/explained that right.
Also, how about an option to disable the time/date – I read my feeds often so I find no need for that. It could still be there but in the feed details page?
MikeC, We definitely realize there isn’t much screen real estate on the iPhone. As of the first iteration, it will be 2 lines for title and 2 lines for preview. We realize that this loses a bit of real estate when the title is only one line. We have a lot of benchmarking to do before we can decide to make the preview and title sizes dynamic. We are very big on having a fast, smooth scrolling application and having to calculate title size and readjust on the fly will get expensive when there are a lot of feed items scrolling by.
Mike
Hi,
Just bought Feeds, seems to be a nice app so far. However, I’ve got several feature requests:
– first, it should be possible to disable those distracting notifications that pop up every time I open an item
– second, is there a way to only show unread items/feeds? having to scroll through a list of 140+ feeds if I only want to read one of them isn’t very pleasant
– third, next/previous items at the top make the app impossible to use with one hand only.
And a minor bug: switching to another theme still leaves the loading preview in green. While I understand that you can’t change it dynamically (because of the way code signing works), why not change the loading image to something theme-neutral (basically a splash screen)?
Zee, Thanks for the feedback. Almost all of the notifications were removed in the 1.3 version. All of the feed item related ones are gone. There is currently an ‘unread only’ option but it only affects the ‘All Items’ list and folder views. Version 1.3 will have the unread option work for all of your feeds as in your request. We actually had a splash screen but due to popular demand it was removed. For some reason, it just got no love. No one wanted to see it up there. Perhaps we will work up an intermediate solution.
Mike
Will you be adding a feature to add tags to articles that I’m reading, like in Google Reader? For example, I may want to tag an article as: “Mac, development” or “gadget, deals”
Mike, the interface looks superb.
My only question is WHEN can I get it from the appstore or is there a way I can help beta test?
Great work!
JesseRPI, We can very easily put in the ability to add tags. We have already decided not to include tag viewing though. There is always a very fine line as to what we should support on a mobile platform and what we should not. We decided a ways back that tag viewing was not necessary but adding a tag seems totally reasonable. The new layout would easily allow us to put a third button on the top to add tags and possibly even notes. I’d say you can probably expect at least one of those to sneak into 1.3 and the other will make the release after.
Mike
Fedorov, We have an update awaiting approval from Apple right now that we expect to go through in the next day or so. As soon as it does, we will hopefully be putting the new update in the queue for review as long as our testing proves that it is stable. Unfortunately, Apple makes it very hard to include outside beta testers so we are stuck doing all of our testing in house.
Mike
Hi Mike,
great job in developing this app.
I agree with MikeC, date&time is mostly usless to many readers since most of us read regularly and exact time is not that much important. I cant still be shown on details page.
Also, regarding my request of losing one bar (top or bottom) in feeds. IMHO, two bars a bit of overkill on such a small screen. And in landscape mode almost half of screen estate is lost.
I dont know for other people, but I NEVER used ‘share’ or ‘email link’. Most people use it ocasionally if ever.
Also, when page is loaded, that round thing that moves when
iPhone is loading stuff could be placed near wireless icon, so I believe even in portrait mode you can place everything on one bar.
Either way, great app!
ehh, butterfingers, correction
…”It can still be shown on details page.”
If you can add the ability to add tags, that would be terrific. As you said, viewing is not as important as the ability to add them. Oh, and please keep the “e-mail link” (I’m one of those who uses it fairly often).
I like the add tag idea as well so it is on the todo list along with adding notes. No guarantees, but it is possible either one or both might make it into the next update.
Mike
a) when you say a feed can’t be marked as unread “unless you just marked it as read”… what’s the timeframe on “just”? Is it since I opened this instance of the app? Or can I no longer mark as unread once I read another post?
b) re: Max’s comment above, I definitely email a link to stories all the time.
Hey! Has anybody requested Instapaper integration? It would be nice to bookmark an article for later viewing without having to open Safari.
@Steve,
a: I wish I had a good answer for that. Google hasn’t actually released a real way to use Google Reader so there is no documentation or anything. From my testing (only about 2 days worth so far), it appears that you can mark an item as read as long as you keep Feeds open and don’t login/logout from any other sources (computer, Safari, etc). I am going to go out on a limb and guess that as long as you don’t shut down the app and have to login again it should work. After that, it will only be marked as unread in Feeds and not on Google’s servers.
b: I do too. It is like my little note pad of research items.
@Rick, InstaPaper has been requested once or twice in the last few months. Integration is pretty easy so if we get some more people who want it I’ll stick an InstaPaper button on the feed details page. Is anyone else interested?
Mike
I support the InstaPaper feature. I use it daily.
+1 for InstaPaper
Just bought this today. Pretty nice app! I know it has been addressed already on here, but I wanted to add my voice to request for a “only unread everywhere” feature. That would really help out for how I read.
Other thing, I have been going into all items with show only unread marked, hitting the first item then just hitting the down arrow as I go through things. Problem is, I sometimes come across a entry that is good, but I have no idea what blog I am reading, as there is no way to tell without going back to the all items list. If you could have the blog title added to the entry reading screen, that would be wicked.
Thanks
Jim
@Jim, thanks for the feedback! Only unread is all set and will be released with version 1.3. Showing the feed title is an option for the details page that we will certainly consider.
Mike
please please resist the tentation to add 2643643 features. I bought Feeds because it was the nicer, faster and simpler RSS feeds reader.
Do not become a clone of the others!
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I LOVE you removed the splash screen. splash screen is hideous. the empty interface is nice and give feeling the application is starting. For what I care, you could remove themes. (themes are just useless settings)
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the rss and star icons in the top bar in your screen capture are weird. Grey and orange ??? you should go back to the white/embossed stuff.
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between what I can do in google reader or without google reader it’s becoming complex. well I don’t use it, it’s simpler like that
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what is instapaper ?
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resist people !
Hi
I bought both byline and feeds. I love the speed of feeds, however, the only thing that I would want improved is the image sizes for blogs like engadget. Currently feeds shows them too large so that I have to scroll quite a bit to get to the text. On byline, the image is adapted to the screensize (god knows how they do this), which makes it much more pleasant.
addition: i just noticed that I cannot pinch to zoom out either
Am I missing something?
I use the ‘email link’ button almost every day. It’s one of the many things I love about Feeds. After mailing, Is there a way to go straight back to the app, where you left off? Similar to the way the app store does after you email via ‘tell a friend’. That would be cool and time saving. Feeds does a good job of this with YouTube links- you finish the video and are smack back to where you left off.
As always, thanks for taking feedback with a patient ear.
Regards,
Scott
@Rainer, we format all the feed descriptions in a way that makes it so that you don’t have to zoom in/out. We have image resizing on our todo list so expect it in a future update.
@Scott, unfortunately with the current setup Apple does not allow us to come back to Feeds automatically after sending an email.
Mike,
I don’t know if anyone else has complained about this problem, but Feeds gives me a serious problem when I go into a category, say, “Apple”, and I click on “All unread items”, then if I choose to “Mark all as read” the screen gets really screwed up. It’s hard to explain, but Feeds tries to return back to the main screen or category and half the screen gets cut off, and You only see some content on the bottom half of the screen, while the upper half is blank.
This happens to me more than half the times I try to “Mark all as read” within a category. The only way to resolve the issue is to restart Feeds. I’ve also tried the reset option within the Feeds settings and also rebooting the whole iPhone, but to no avail…. any ideas?
To be more accurate about the process… I should say that when I go into a category, say, “Apple” and click on “All items in Category” then choose the “Mark All Read” button, that is when I frequently get the display problem.
I’m not sure if this problem also happens even when you drill down to specific feeds, I usually view all new items by the “All items in Category” option, as I have several feeds and find it easier just to view all the unread titles at once.
@Ryan, I have seen that happen a few times as well. I have tried and tried to be able to duplicate it but I have never done so on purpose. If you can come up with the steps required to make it happen consistently let me know ASAP so I can patch that up.
Mike
Howdy Mike….
Since the most recent update, I’m crashing *every* time I try and go back up via the ‘Items’ button after viewing a page (‘View Page’) using the Feeds internal browser. I hit ‘Items’, it locks up for 4-5 seconds, and then I’m back at Springboard.
Do you know about this? Is there a fix? Is there any information I can provide to help?
Best,
-bmr
@Brett, I apologize about the crashing. The fix is already in Apple’s hands. The problem was memory related so if you have feed previews on, turn them off temporarily and if you are displaying more than 20 items at a time, drop the number back to 20. Restart your iPhone after changing the settings to purge the memory and get a fresh start. That *should* get your through until the update comes out.
Mike
Oh, you know, I’m an idiot. I forgot to reboot after the update. Things are working fine again. Nothing to see here, go about your business, etc. Sorry for the interruption.
Ahh, ok. Thx, Mike.