• The ‘Show only Unread’ feature will now hide feeds and folders that don’t have any read items
• Reordering of feeds and folders for Google Reader (Note: changing the order in Feeds will not affect the order on Google Reader)
• Better InstaPaper integration.  Feeds will not prompt for and remember your password so you only need to enter it once.
• Better ReadItLater integration.  Same as InstaPaper, Feeds will ask for your login info only once and then remember it.  You no longer need to go into Settings.app to enter your login info.
• Visual overhaul.  We changed the look and feel a bit because Feeds was looking a little bit dated with an emphasis on performance so there isn’t too much visual flair.
• Actual website favicons are displayed (when available.  RSS feeds that use aggrigators such as FeedBurner will not have their favicons present).
• If you have 3.0 installed you will get to use the standard Apple Mail.app compose message right inside Feeds.
• You can now post to Twitter a message that can (if you want to) include a shortened version of the articles permalink.
• When viewing a list of articles, you can send an email with all the articles including their permalinks and preview text.
• The much needed Help button has been added (pay no attention to the ugly icon placeholder in the pic below)
• We removed a bunch of settings from the Settings.app to simplify things.
• You can now back sync as far as 5 days (not suggested. It WILL be slow).
• You can now set the number of items per feed to save as low as 25.  This speeds things up for those who have a ton of feeds.
• Blue is now the default theme color.
• A few bug fixes here and there

We apologize about the delay with 1.7 and really hope Apple makes some changes to their review process.  Not to gripe, but in the time Feeds has been in review (since July 2nd) three updates to Facebook have been approved.  Favoritism?  Unfair review practices?  You be the judge…

And now some screenshots:

UPDATE:  we pulled the previous version 1.7 that has been in review since July 2nd yesterday and replaced it with this version.  Version 1.7 will now be the version in the images above.  We are hoping that resubmitting won’t add any more time the review process (is it possible to add any more time at this point?).  Maybe the last update we sent to Apple got ‘lost’ over there.  Who knows?  Not us, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: Apple just approved version 1.7!  We are already aware of 2 bugs and we apologize about that.  The rushed cycle due to our last update not being accepted after 6 weeks caused us to get a bit itchy on our trigger fingers.  The 2 bugs we are aware of only affect landscape mode so hopefully it won’t affect too many people.

We are wrapping up testing on the next update now.  There isn’t too much to report on this one.  There are a couple additions and we are starting the process of removing some settings as well.For the additions, we are adding ReadItLater support.  There will be a spot in Settings where you can put your ReadItLater login and password so if you don’t have a ReadItLater account now is the time to secure your username.  Apparently ReadItLater is getting popular really quickly and we didn’t want to be left behind.

Also added in the update is a toggle to turn off the features that use shaking to activate.  We also make it require a bit more effort to get the shake to be recognized so that we can avoid false positives.

Probably the most significant update and also the most elusive is a small change we made to attempt to remedy some syncing issues.  Without getting into too much detail, currently Feeds will ALWAYS grab the freshest unread count from Google every time you start it up.  Feeds does not always do a sync though.  Currently, if the ‘Refresh Feed Items’ setting time has not elapsed Feeds will not fetch the new items.  This leads to the unread count being slightly different (or very different depending on the RSS feeds and the interval set) than the number of actual unread items.  All this dies on this day.  Feeds will sync each and every time you start it up.  We are no longer going to worry about the data plan you are on and trying to penny pinch the couple kilobytes of data.  The complaints far outweigh any benefit in us trying to be frugal with the feed updates.  This is the first step in eradicating all the confusing options in the Settings app.  More to come.

Also added to the feed details page is the title of the current feed that you are reading.  This helps out when you are using the All Items or any folders so that you know what feed you are reading.

The final feature addition is a toggle to turn ‘View only Unread’ on and off from within Feeds.  When you are on the main feed page just give your iPhone a shake and you will be able to toggle the setting.  This comes in handy when you want to view some old items that are already read.  Just give it a shake, and get going to read the old read items.  When you are done, give it another shake and you are back to showing only read items.

On the obvious front (for those who have read any recent posts and comments in here), we have upside mode coming.  For some reason beyond my comprehension there are some folks out there who like to read their feeds oldest item first.  After a bit of playing around with it we also updated the ‘Items per Feed’ setting to allow you to choose 50 items.  It didn’t seem to make sense to have 100+ items when you are reading upside down.

Support for App Store links has been added.  If you follow a link to any apps the App Store application should open on the requested page.

An experimental image resizing setting will be added as well.  This will resize any images that are too big for the screen to fit on the screen.  Why is it experimental?  Because I have no idea how all the different RSS feeds out there deal with their images and there is no way I can test all cases.  So, can it harm anything to be ON?  Nope.  All that *might* happen if a few images that were supposed to be small end up being as wide as the screen.  Nothing major.

It is likely that the feed details page will get a makeover as well, though not guaranteed.  It is way too busy for our tastes.  We are simple folk who like to hide complexity as much as possible.  The only button we can see being used often enough to need to be front and center is the star button in our humble opinions.  Sure InstaPaper, tagging, sharing, emailing and all that good stuff is nice and wonderful but it really doesn’t need to be polluting the screen.  We are going to consolidate all of that functionality into a single action button.  This will more than likely make all actions besides starring an item and viewing the web page take two touches but we feel the tradeoff is well worth the extra touches.  Who doesn’t like extra touching anyway?

Feed preview has been reworked as well.  It will now expand to 3 rows when the title only takes up 1 row.  An example picture is below:

And for the not so obvious features, we have for all Google Users the ability to send an email directly from within Feeds!  No more having to quit and go to the Mail application then reload Feeds when you are done.  Choose your send to address right from your contacts!  Send to multiple recipients!  All right from within Feeds!  This will be a welcome addition for us mainly because we don’t ever use the email feature due to the fact that it kicks us out of Feeds.  This will actually make it useful.

A minor tweak to the UI will makes it’s way into the next release as well.  We moved the ‘Add Feed’ button from the top left to the bottom left.  This is to avoid accidental touching when going back from your feed items.  As always, keep the feedback coming.  As you all know, your feedback is what drives future development.

As soon as we do some more testing we will be releasing the update to everyone.  Such a massive change will require a lot of testing and we want to be as sure as possible that we didn’t miss anything.

In it’s current state, Google does not yet provide us a way to get the order of your RSS feeds without some ugly hackery that we don’t want to take part in.  That is the reason that you cannot sort you feeds when syncing with Google Reader yet.  The best we can do for now is to sort your RSS feeds alphabetically.  This will also go out with the next update.

Update:  Version 1.22 had a small bug that occurred when you try to add a feed when you are offline.  We fixed the bug and the update should go live in the App Store in a few days.

• Offline Mode – Feeds will store your feed items on your iPhone so you don’t need to have internet access to be able to be able to read them
• Unread Count – Each of your feeds will have the current amount of items that are unread next to the title
• Editable Titles – You’ll be able to edit the titles of all of your feeds to whatever you’d like
• Categories – Categorize your Feeds into ‘folders’ for simple organization.  Great for those with a lot of feeds.  (Note:  if you don’t have any categories for your feed it will work exactly as it does now.  All feeds with no categories will appear on the front page)
• Read Web Pages in Feeds – instead of opening Safari to check out the originating web site you will be able to check them out right in Feeds. PLEASE NOTE:  This one comes with a major disclaimer.  It will be available only from the Settings application on your iPhone/iTouch.  This is because there are quite a few bugs when using Mobile Safari in an application that causes it to crash when a web page has a lot of external assets (images, style sheets and especially javascript files).  We originally had this in Feeds but the instability caused us to remove it.  Due to popular demand, you can turn this on and take the responsibility for the instability by your own choice!

There are probably a few more that I am missing, so when I think of them I will update this post.

The main debate about categories is whether they should be done inline (like Contacts does letters or Starred Feeds does titles) or if the categories should be split up into folders (like Mail app).  It seems that the latter method (we will call it ‘inline categories’ for ease of reference) would be great for quick organization of a small number of feeds.  If you have more than a handful of feeds, the former (‘drill down categories’) method is definitely the way to go.  In addition to the ease of organizing large numbers of feeds, the drill down method lends itself to have items for ‘view all unread messages in this category’ or ‘view all messages in this category’ and it would provide a nice, simple way to see how many unread items are in each category.

For illustration purposes, below are a couple images showing what the difference would be between the drill down method and inline:

Inline Categories

Drill Down Categories

If anyone has an opinion feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form on the main page.