Feeds – The Next Minor Update
April 24, 2009 — Mike (admin)UPDATE: ReadItLater seems to be working well and our testing of the other changes is complete. Feeds version 1.5 is now in Apple’s hands.
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.
ReadItLater support – perfect, great app.
Shake amendments – thank you
Syncing – sounds a great strategy
Looking forward to this update, nice work once again.
Sorry Mike, meant to ask if resized images maintain aspect ratio now please?
@Fedorov, resize images with proper aspect ratio will more than likely make the next update, not this one. I must warn though, that it isn’t perfect and it will fall back to the current resizing. Too many RSS feeds don’t follow the spec so it makes it hard to get it right.
@Doug, we have no plans to swap out the backend at this time though it is possible we will give more options in a future update. If Google would just compress their data the transmission time could be cut in half…
I try to avoid the google reader sync because these feeds are coming so slow.
How can I import the direct RSS feed adress instead of typing…
Thanks
@Ingo, there is no direct way without typing but the Feed Adder tool might be of use to you in getting your RSS feeds in if you are not using Google Reader: http://www.prime31.com/iphone/feeds-095-finally-available-in-the-app-store-plus-new-features/.
Please add Newsgator as a option. Reader is so slow. I like your interface and Instapaper support but I use Netnewswire because of speed, it loads 1/4 of the time Feeds does and the counts are always right. I mean Feeds is Slow!!!!!!!!!
Just got the latest version, nicely done.
I did have a lot of trouble finding the Read It Later support though. I opened the feed actions and saw the instapaper button but no RIL button.
It wasn’t until I Googled and then found this page that I realized you had to go into the settings to change it.
I would recommend making the RIL button appear even before the user has entered their login. Then if they click it, it either asks for the user/pass right there or tells them where to go. It was very confusing.
@Robert, We didn’t even know the update went live yet. Apple never sent us a note letting us know. We put a note in the update “(available in the Settings application)” and we just added it to the description. We are trying to keep the interface simple and not showing the button for those who don’t want to use it which is why it doesn’t appear by default.
Mike, just an extra thanks for the RIL support, using these two apps together makes my iPhone sheer joy to use.
Great APP. Only one thing. Using “email Article” results in an error-message “Login/Password invalid”. In Google I am using only the reader, no other services. Could this be the problem? Any help? Thanks!
@Peter, you are getting that error because you don’t have Googles other services. There is an option to use the regular Mail app on the iPhone in the Settings.
@Fedorov, glad you lie the update. I still have to pick up RIL on the iPhone and give it a shot.
Just want to say thanks again for the great communication about the feature changes. I’m glad there was a good reason for the innacurate counts previously, and delighted that the solution won’t hurt me
How are you progressing on the “share with note” feature? That´s the only thing I miss in your spec now
@Per-Åke Olsson, the share with note feature should make it in the next update.
I’m also getting the email error. I know that I can turn off the email from within Feeds / Google, but how do I get it to work so that I don’t get the error (and don’t have to leave the Feeds application)?
@Michael, do you have a valid Gmail email address entered as your Feeds username? If so, it should work for you.
@Mike Sounds great!
Hello Mike,
Great job on this update! Feeds just keeps getting better and better! Thanks for all your hard work!
I do have a couple questions/bugs to report:
1. Right after it finishes syncing, I’ll tap on a feed (doesn’t matter which one) and it will then go to the feed’s page but will stay loading forever without displaying any items. If I quit Feeds and reopen it then the items appear right away.
2. If I go into a feed item and then either follow a link in it to the App Store or view the webpage and then go back to the list of feed items, it resets my location in the list of feed items to the top. This means if I have a feed with a bunch of new items that there’s quite a bit of scrolling to get back to the one I was just on. Is there a way to correct this?
Thanks again,
Garibaldi
Apparently the email address linked to my Google account is not a Gmail address and it won’t let me add a Gmail address without changing all of my other settings (most importantly the login for my blog).
Love you app, use it all the time. Kudos.
Any hope to see a “send as Tweet” button?
Thanks
Great app. Just a suggestion: the only thing that Feeds does NOT have and News has is the ability to read feed in a mobile format. This is much easier than reading the whole page, and since many feeds now have very short excerpts, we need to go to the browser (internal or external) and it is a hassle. Please find a way to make the feed go thru google.com/gwt/n so we can read it faster and clearer.
Thanks a lot.
@Marcos, I just added it as an option for the ‘View Page” button. Thanks for the suggestion. It will make it out in the next update, version 1.6.
Great app, best RSS reader out there and love the Google sync. One issue, and forgive me if this has been addressed, but it seems like once the sync fails due to a blip in service or WiFi, the app seems to stay in Offline Mode. Am I doing something wrong, or is a restart always necessary?
Thanks
@Ryan, we have this on our ToDo list for a future update. We will be putting a button on the main feed page to attempt to login again.
I Like your software but please…
Do something to optimize data access. Have a look at Gazette. It load in background process and quickly… Feeds had much better GUI and possibilities.
Other. You can add visual feedback when accessing Network.
@Pat, thanks for the feedback. What other types of visual feedback would you like to see? Currently, Feeds will show the standard network activity indicator (top left of the status bar) anytime it is accessing the network. In addition, during syncing you will get update messages on the bottom tab bar that vary depending on if you are using Google Reader sync or the standard Feeds sync.
I use it with Google Reader and many time the app seems frozen. After some seconds numbers appear in feed lines. Some other tomes when I choose one feed with an itemcount > 0 no item appears. They come later.
I change some param on pref and the app seems more reactive.
Still working great. Sync times are still pretty good as well. A couple things I would mention:
1. As mentioned above, there are a couple lag points in the app:
a. Once sync completed, the number of unread feeds doesn’t appear immediately; there is a pause/delay between the completion of the sync and the app displaying the unread count (this also appears to be longer of a delay depending on the number of unread)
b. Once sync completed and unread count displayed, navigating to all or a folder also has a delay at the display of the feed items, similar to that of the delay of the display of the unread feed count.
2. The ability to edit the folder titles and contents does not seem to want to work for me. When I tap a folder, nothing happens. May need to look into?
3. I may be the only one here, but I would request a little “spazzier” interface. Currently the white background with gray separating lines just looks too plain for an item as beautiful as the iPhone/iPod. I don’t want to mention the competition (because this app is still superior), but the interface has been a drawback for me compared to another (Google sync reader), because I know it could be so much more. Something as simple as bubbled line items, icons for the folders matching that of the main categories (in size and complexity; see folder icons vs. “All Items” for example), and just a shaded/bubbled background for feed view, would make a world of difference. I may be picky, but GUI has always been a big deal to me, and I wish Feeds was just a hair more visually appealing.
To close, the app is still by far the best in the App Store with its functionality and usability, and all I can say is keep up the good work!
Sorry, I forgot to mention something else…I know this has been mentioned before, but the order of the feeds in All Items doesn’t match that of Google Reader. I know this can be done, because (sorry again) one of the competitors app does this correctly. For some reason I believe feeds shows the articles in the alphabetical order of your feed subscription titles. I just like the display by date function that Google Reader uses that way they’re in chronological order.
Again, great app thus far. Love it!
@Victor, thanks for the feedback. To address your items: 1. the delay you see there is just the iPhone loading the next page up. It only has to do it once and in order to keep the sync as fast as possible we do not preload the next page. 2. Folders cannot be directly edited. In Google Reader folders aren’t really folders like on your computer. They are just tags. In order to indirectly modify folders you can just modify the feeds that are in the folder. If you want to change the name of a folder for all the feeds in it, you should use the Google Reader web page. 3. We actually created a version of Feeds that had some more graphical flair but never released it to the wild. Perhaps if we can revisit the updated UI in a future update….As for the All Items order, that is definitely a bug. We will get that patched up ASAP.
Thanks for the response. About the folder editing capabilities: for some reason I vaguely being able to edit tags and their contents in prior versions, but easily could be wrong. Similarly, when you tap edit in the app, it gives an informational drop down at the top of the screen that says tap to edit description, or something similar, and I thought this was related to what I had mentioned; I guess not.
As for the graphical flair (like the terminology), again I may be the only one, but I would really like to see this in the near future. Maybe I’ll see that in a future update one day, with the searching feature I mentioned before…maybe one day…
Thanks for listening!
The images don’t resize so I have to scroll around to see them… any plans to make them fit in the window? Turning sideways fits horizontally but means even more scrolling usually. It’d also be nice to view the original post within the app. Both of these things are done pretty nicely in Doppler although Doppler is slow at syncing, etc.
@Dan, There is a setting in the Settings.app labeled ‘Resize Images to Fit’. If you turn that on, Feeds will attempt to resize any images that are properly embedded in the RSS feed.
Also in the Settings.app is a setting labeled ‘View Articles’ that lets you choose to view the articles in Feeds or externally.
Great app! Wonder if you know that if all Feeds are read I still have a number on the outsite button of the app (247, means 247 messages not read) and that while I marked ALL read (yes, really ALL). It happens since a lot of versions and I hoped it was solved at every update. But I am patient
Another thing I’ve noticed regarding Offline Mode. I have a few Google Alerts that are delivered via RSS in Reader. In Feeds, when I read these items I almost immediately get the ‘Failed to Update’ message and go Offline. When I View All and swipe to mark as read, I think it’s ok. But if I navigate to the feed (They are a few folders deep) and read them normally, I get the error.
Seems to only happen on the Google Alerts Items
@Henk, Are you using Google Reader to sync or the older, Feeds sync? If you are using Reader there is a switch in the Settings.app to ‘Reset on Next Launch’. Give that a try and it should clear things up for you.
@Ryan, I’ll add a few Google Alerts for myself and see what I an find.
Hi,
I’ve tried almost all the gReader/RSS apps on the iPhone, and was settled on Doppler, till I found out about Feeds. First off, congratulations! It’s a super app – clean, tidy, and above all, FAST. I can’t believe how much faster it is than Doppler. It’s like night and day. You have hands down the best app of its kind on the store. Bravo!
My only quibbles are aesthetic. I’m a designer by trade, and they’re important to me and others like me (Victor, in the thread above), although of course not everybody is quite as obsessive about these things as I am. Nonetheless, design and elegance are traditional iPhone strengths, and your app is already so good that it’s a shame it should lack in this department. With just a tiny makover it could be a killer…
So, if I may, here are a few of the things that bother me. Please take this for the constructive criticism it’s intended to be…:-)
- The default green colour scheme. Ugh… Just about everything I’ve read about Feeds on the Web or in the App Store mentions it (!) and in an uncomplimentary fashion. It’s doing your app somewhat of a disservice. It doesn’t need to be thrown out if you are really attached to it, but I suggest you make the blue or black the default instead. They’re far more elegant, if a little more conservative.
- The app icon is very problematic – first off, the queasy combination of green and orange hurts the eyes
Secondly, the icon’s glyphs are too small – fussy and illegible. There’s far too much going on in there. Also, the icon doesn’t need the outline. It clutters it and makes the usable area smaller. The whole icon ends up looking flat and confused. An icon needs to be distinctive (for the right reasons 
and immediately legible. I think one of your rivals (Manifesto) has it about right, even if their dark blue is a bit seen-it-before. But their glyph is brilliantly simple.
- The splash screen – like the icon, it uses green and orange to devastating effect, and the title “Feeds” looks a little sad in its boilerplate Times typeface. With a little overhauling the splash screen could be a killer. A lot of reward for not much effort.
- Typography – I personally prefer Doppler’s (and others) use of bold fonts for the folder names, feed and article titles. The iPhone’s font smoothing seems better on the bold font, and the whole interface looks more solid and substantial somehow when the bold is there. Perhaps it could be an option, if you don’t want to make it the default?
To sum up, I hope you don’t feel I’ve trashed Feeds here. I must emphasise that I’m very impressed indeed with the app – I can’t stress that enough – and that my aesthetic judgements are very personal. All of these things are superficial and very easy to fix. The foundations of the app are 100% spot on. I’m only talking about the surface.
So there you go. Should you wish for help redesigning the icons or the splash screen, I’d be delighted to make some proposals, for free of course
Congrats again, and thanks for a great app!
Ric
@Ric, thanks for the feedback. If you would like to take a crack at a redesign we would be happy to use it if it looks good. The current splash screen was actually done by one of our users. Feel free to change things up and send us over a PSD or whatever other image format you would like and we’ll see what happens.
Please tell me you all will be releasing an update rather soon that will include push
Mike,
Not sure if you’ve seen this URL yet or not. But someone made a comparision chart of gReader/iPhone apps. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pajb3KcZqX0lmwz0R7giBdg&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=A3:G27
And a question. I noticed in the app description on the app store, that if people are having lag issues, to re-install the app. I did, it cleared up my lag troubles (sometimes upwards to 3 minutes before any data was displayed). But I lost all my settings. I do not want to do that again. Will I have to as time goes on? Is this a leak of some sort?
Having to do this again in the future is really a non-starter for me. The lag along was enough to have made me start looking at other gReader apps.
@Mike, Thanks for the link. We hadn’t seen that one yet.
As for the re-install issue, so far the only time it has happened is on the initial download from the App Store. Updates seem to work smoothly. We have never been able to reproduce the issue so as of now we don’t know exactly what it is. Our best guess is something gets corrupted in the download process because re-installing seems to fix it every time.
Thanks for the quick response! I hope to continue enjoying the app.
With the 3.0 update, swiping to star or mark as read a feed does not appear to work. Tried deleting and reinstalling.
@Jeff, thanks for the heads up. We will be installing 3.0 on our devices in a few days. We’ll patch up the issue and send an update to Apple.
Any future for push notification for Feeds?
@RBM, as much as we would like to to put push notification into Feeds we can’t really find a good fit for them. Most people have so many RSS feeds and RSS feeds update so often it doesn’t make much sense for us to push out a notification every time a feed updates. Perhaps we will come up with something in the future though…
@Mike thanks for the quick reply. Will look forward to the update. My Mark as Read button should keep me squared away until then
Mike, any chance of getting the full mail API folded into Feeds now that 3.0 is out?
@Joe, once adoption of 3.0 gets up to speed we will certainly be replacing our version of in-app emailing to the standard Apple version.
Works fine as long as I am connected, crashes if I turn off WiFi/3G
@Sergey, does the crash occur when you are connected and then lose connection? Can you provide crash logs so that we can get that fixed up?
Mike, I was having major slow-down issues while away on holiday, very noticeable when only on a GPRS signal. When I got home, back on my 3G and Wifi it was still bad so I took the “Reset at next start” option and it has been fine the past few weeks.
Here is my question if you don’t mind – I NEVER use Google Reader, I ONLY use Feeds on my iPhone for reading all my feeds.
Would it make more sense to turn Google sync OFF in feeds? I presume it would give me even more speed – is there any downside to me setting Feeds up in this way?
Thanks again.
@Fedorov, definitely do not turn off Google Reader sync. If you do, you will end up using our servers which, as you can imagine, are far slower than Googles for RSS retrieval. What you should do is change the ‘Interval to Back Sync’ to ‘Never’. That will be sure that Feeds doesn’t bother redownloading old items just in case you may have read them on your computer.
Understood, thanks for that Mike.
Hi Mike,
This is a great app that does everything I want for RSS reading on iPhone – Sync’ing with Google. Not sure if it has been reported already but, I have few sync’ing issues wondering if you could help me (I only sync with Google, have no local feeds added, and have only unread items shown setting.)
- Sync failed message popup soon after app launch. Everytime I started the app it retrieves new entries from Google and I’m able to see the unread numbers coming, but the Sync failed message soon pops up and disapear (and never appear again.) I think something went wrong during the sync’ing process, but when I visit Google Reader site I do see the read / stared status taking effect. So I’ll just have to ignore the Sync failed message and it will sync another time when I launch the app, I guess?
- The unred numbers of a folder changes dramatically at app launch. The unread items next to a folder is always so different everytime I start the app, for example I would get 1,500 unread items now and get 3,000 unread items when I start the app one minute later.
- Unread items does not exist when entering a feed, but exist in the “Show all itmes in this folder”. This might be related to the above problem but, I always have to browse unread items for a feed under the All view because the single feed view does not show anything.
- I recal the sync’ing functions seem to work expectedly was the first time I started the app, if I can get the app to work at the original state I don’t mind wiping the setting of Feeds. Also in the FAQ or somewhere in this blog said delete Google setting from Feeds would work sometimes, I’d like to do that but how exactly can I delete the Google setting (or even deleting all Feeds settings)?
Thank you!
Mike, your most recent comment makes me feel like I may have been misunderstanding back syncing all this time I’ve been using Feeds. Can you explain in a little more detail what exactly back sync is for? In my case, the only time I use Reader on my PC is to view starred or tagged messages that I’ve read and filed on my phone. Do I need to back sync?
@Joe, back syncing for you, isn’t necessary. The reason it exists is for people who read some RSS feeds on their iPhone and some on their computer. Basically, what it does is instead of just downloading the items Feeds hasn’t yet downloaded, it will go back in time a bit and redownload some items it already has. This is just in case you read an item on your computer that you had already downloaded on your iPhone.
Here’s a scenario that will hopefully make sense:
- You download a bunch of items at 1PM and only read half of them.
- 2 hours later you go on your computer and read every item in your RSS feeds
Feeds will need to ‘back sync’ so that it knows that you have read the older items.
@user @ 2ch Japan, first off, are you using Google Reader to do the syncing? If so, try going into Settings -> Google Settings -> Reset on next start and turn it ON. That should clear things up for you.