The OPML exporter is located at: http://ifeeder.prime31.com/export/opml/DEVICE_ID_GOES_HERE

Just replace the DEVICE_ID_GOES_HERE part with your deviceId and you will magically get an OPML file that *should* work with Google Reader.  Enjoy!

UPDATE: There is a problem on Apple’s end with Feeds in the App Store. We spoke to them a few hours ago and they are hopefully working on the problem.  They could not provide an ETA for us as to when Feeds will be available in the App Store again.

UPDATE 2:  We have no idea whatsoever when Apple will fix the issue of Feeds not being in the App Store.  They *claim* they fixed it yesterday but it sure doesn’t look like it from our perspective.  Trying to communicate with them is the most frustrating experience on earth.  3 different departments are responsible for this part of the App Store and each of them claims they have no phone numbers for the other departments.  Only one department lets us call them.  All that department does is send an email to the other department.  It is agonizingly difficult to get any relevant information from them.  End rant.

FINAL UPDATE: Feeds is FINALLY propagating itself back into all the App Stores across the world.  Thank you everyone for your patience.  Apple has added many gray hairs this week….

Speed of Syncing is my Priority – Set the ‘Interval to Back Sync’ to ‘Never’ and ‘Refresh Feed Items’ to 5 minutes.  This is the fastest way to get your feed items but it sacrifices some accuracy in read/unread items.  If the ‘Interval to Back Sync’ is never, Feeds will never fetch an item more than once.  This means that if you open Feeds and download some items then read those same items in Reader, Feeds will not know about it.

Accurate Syncing of Read/Unread is my Priority – Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to ’1 Day’ and ‘Refresh Feed Items’ to 5 minutes.  This will slow down your syncing (especially if you have a lot of feeds) but it will be sure do grab the last day’s worth of items from Reader.  This setting is for users who open Feeds a few times a day but don’t really get through all of their feeds while using Feeds.

Balance of Fast Syncing and Accuracy of Read/Unread Status – This is where most users will be.  You want Feeds to sync pretty fast and you want the read/unread status to stay pretty much in sync.  Let’s break this down into how often you open Feeds:

• Once per day: Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to ‘Never’.  You won’t need to backsync if you only open Feeds once per day.
• Every few hours: Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to about 2 or 3 hours.
• Pretty Often: Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to 30 minutes to keep syncs nice and fast.

Things to consider in choosing your settings:

• If you often open Feeds and don’t go through all of your items you need to set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to approximately the time between launches of Feeds
• If you find that Feeds shows unread items on the main screen but you don’t see any unread items in the feed itself that is an indicator that you need to set the ‘Refresh Feed Items’ to a lower interval.  Feeds will not resync on every startup for performance and battery life reasons.  You can also manually refresh any single feed by pressing the refresh button while in the feed list.  This will take varying amounts of time based on your ’Interval to Back Sync’ setting and how long it has been since the last sync.  If new items are present (and they probably will be if your unread feed count showing and there are no unread items present) you will see a status message on the top of the screen and the new items will appear.

What happens when I open Feeds?

This varies greatly depending on your settings.  In just about all cases, Feeds will log into Google Reader and fetch your feed list and unread counts first.  If you have the ’Refresh Interval’ setting at ‘Manual’, Feeds will NOT download any items so your unread counts will almost certainly be out of sync.  If your ‘Refresh Interval’ is set to a higher interval than the last time you opened Feeds your feed items will get synced and you will see an indication of this on the bottom of the main feed screen.  First Feeds will grab your reading list while displaying the ‘Syncing: All Items’ text.  Once it finishes grabbing all of your items it will refresh your starred and shared items.  As soon as all of the data is synced ready to be read, your feed item counts will show up on the main screen.

I hope this post helps out some of the folks who were having the feed items out of sync issue.  As you can see, while Feeds looks pretty simple on the outside there is a lot going on under the hood.  We didn’t want to reveal too much of the underlying mechanisms here so as not to bore you to sleep.  We just wanted you to know enough of what is happening to get your settings straight and find out what works for you.

And now for a real world example.  I open Feeds (when not testing) about 4 – 5 times per day.  In between those times I open Reader here and there.  I always go through all of my unread items each time I open Feeds or use Reader.  When I am done, there are never items left unread.  I star, tag or InstaPaper the items I am interested in.  My settings are: ’Refresh Interval’ ’5 Minutes’ and ‘Interval to Back Sync’ ’30 minutes’.  The only reason I leave back syncing at 30 minutes is for those rare occasions when I don’t get to finish reading my feeds and then go onto Reader and finish up there.

In the meantime, this would be a great time to try out using Google Reader to sync with!

UPDATE: The server maintenance did not go as planned and we are experiencing some downtime.  We hope to have everything up and running within a couple hours (by 11:00 AM PST) at worst.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Looks like we are back up and running.

We thank you all for your patience while we complete the server upgrade.

Thanks.

Feeds Demo

We still have a lot of bug testing to do before we send this version up to the App Store.  Lookout for the new version sometime soon.