Comments on: Feeds – The Next Minor Update

By: Joe Rybicki

Joe Rybicki — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:41:25 +0000

Mike, I feel like at this stage, flat-out removing any feature is probably A Bad Idea. This one in particular, though, since Google appears to be trying to enhance the social elements of Reader lately. But I am 100 percent in favor of turning it off by default and adding an entry in the Settings app to turn it back on.

On a totally unrelated note, I LOVE this WPTouch plugin! Got to install it on my blogs.

By: JG

JG — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:21:54 +0000

You could always make it an option. :p

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:14:15 +0000

@Victor, I can’t say I ever used the shared items besides testing. Starred is definitely needed. Does anyone object to Shared Items getting removed? It doesn’t really serve much purpose in my opinion.

By: Victor Evans

Victor Evans — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:40:47 +0000

I hardly ever (if ever) go offline, so it wouldn’t seem that this is the case, but I could definitely be wrong. I’m not sure what is causing it, but sometimes it’s more than minor, as in it’ll show 50 unread, when there’s really 100. And sometimes (but fairly rarely), even after the Google sync reset, it will do the same thing. Just awkward.

Also, my post above about the ability to remove the starred and shared items from the list was a suggestion more for the fact that I NEVER use shared items, but I do ALWAYS use starred items. I just mentioned the starred items option because there may be some that don’t use them.

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:02:05 +0000

@Shane, Apple seems to be a bit backed up right now. Updates are taking anywhere from 1 – 2 weeks on average from what we are seeing.

By: Shane

Shane — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:47:43 +0000

@Mike – do you have a general feel for how long it is taking to get apps approved through Apple these days? I’ve been checking for App updates at least daily lately since I have a few apps not functioning at 100% w/ 3.0. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a Feeds update so i can continue my eval of the app. Thanks!

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:15:51 +0000

@JG, we do our best to keep up with any bugs reported. Speaking of which, we just sent out an update to Apple to deal with the issues that the 3.0 OS brought up.

We are still thinking about push notifications and their feasibility for Feeds. Sending out a notification for each new story is absolutely not going to happen. We would have to SPAM Google Reader so badly to do that that there is no doubt we would be blocked in no time.

Starred item bug noted and on our To-do list.

We very much want to be able to reorder the feed list as well. Google is *supposed* to release a public API for Google Reader (currently, we are using Google Reader information without an available API). Once the API is available, reordering will come shortly after.

@Victor, do the unread count oddities come either shortly after you were offline or while you are offline?

By: Victor Evans

Victor Evans — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:32:29 +0000

Mike,

As far as the bugs I mentioned are concerned, I’ve done the reset on next start option and can replicate their failures quite often. As far as the pictures in feeds not loading and count discrepancies are concerned, these happen very often, and I do reset the app quite often (the reset within settings). For the most part, the issues clear up immediately, but only temporarily, and occasionally, they reoccur upon next launch. Not sure why.

Thanks again, as JG said, you all should be a model for other developers. Couldn’t have said it better.

By: JG

JG — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:02:06 +0000

First off, I love this app. Your responsiveness to bug reports should be used as a model to other app developers.

Regarding push notifications, I think having badge support would be enough. Nobody in their right mind would want a pop up each time a new feed updated. I simply want to see that I have 20, 42, 100 new feeds available. Make sense?

Quick bug report. If you tap the Starred table entry and then Feeds (in the upper left corner) right away, guaranteed crash. This usually happens when I meant to hit ‘all items’ but accidentally hit ‘Starred’ instead. If you wait for the starred items to load, it won’t crash.

Enhancement request: ability to reorder main screen items would be nice. Also, the item alignment on the first screen always looks a little off. Perhaps the use of same-width icons would fix?

As for the colors comment, I think it looks fine.

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:46:04 +0000

@Shane, Feeds will automatically mark items as read if you either request to read the article (get to the article details page) or swipe from left-to-right on the item in the feed list. Please note, this is broken in the 3.0 version of the OS. We have fixed the problem and will send the update to Apple Monday after some more testing.

Feeds WILL allow you to mark an item as unread. This part is very important though: it will only appear as unread in Google Reader if you have read it recently. Unfortunately, I can’t define recently as it is a Google secret. I would estimate something on the order of 10 minutes. You can’t go to an item that you read last week and mark it as unread. Google won’t allow it. To mark an item as unread, you just swipe from left-to-right on the item in the list of articles. But, as noted above this won’t work in 3.0 until we get the update out to you.

I hope that all makes sense.