Feeds Version 0.96 Sent to Apple for Review
September 22, 2008 — Mike (admin)We just sent a new version to Apple so that they can grace it with their approval and get it out to everyone. This version is a very minor update and will hopefully be our last release before we get Google Reader integration in there.
The new version includes all of the most popular feature requests:
- Unread count for categories
- No unread count displayed for 0 count feeds
- A Home button on the feed details page to send you straight back to your feed list
- Mark as Read now automatically takes you back to your feed list
- Manual refresh option. If you want to conserve battery or only update your feeds on occasion just set the refresh to Manual
- Feeds will automatically get refresh itself if you keep it open the full duration of your refresh time. If you set it to 10 minutes and your are reading your feeds for the full 10 minutes it will automatically fetch some more for you. Adjust the interval in the Settings application on your springboard
Stay tuned for Google Reader integration in the next major update.
Awesome. Thanks for the new update. I have been really enjoying this app. Thank you so much for you dedication and hard work. Looking forward to all the future updates you have planned. Can’t wait for 0.96 to hit the store.
Thanks for all of the great work on this program. I tried to add the rss feed of my friends’ twitter posts and Feeds said that it was not a valid url. It might be because the feed ends in .rss instead of .xml, etc – im not sure. Also, I noticed that in one of the recent versions, a setting has been added for feeds to set a time interval to refresh feed items. Unfortunately, (unless I am doing something wrong) this does not seem to work the way that I would expect it to. I use rss feeds as a news updater of sorts and I want one that will automatically fetch new feeds without me needing to open the app – just the way that the mail program works. That way, I am only opening the app when I know that I have new feeds to read, instead of needing to constantly open the app to check (manual vs automatic refresh). This is an extremely vital feature that I would expect in an rss reader, but I have been unable to find it yet. Is the “refresh feed items” setting supposed to automatically fetch new feeds at a specified time interval without me needing to open the app and tell it to, or does this feature work a different way? Thank you again for all of the great improvements – especially the badge to list all unread feeds. I am anxiously waiting for the feature I have described above to work properly or be added.
Hi Dave, Thanks for the feedback. If you could either post the RSS feed that isn’t working or email it to me I can take a closer look at it. As for Feeds updating while it isn’t open, with the restrictions Apple has in place we cannot update while the application is closed. The reason you can’t find one is just that. Unless Apple makes an RSS reader there will never be one that can fetch feeds for you while it is closed.
Mike
that’s not fun at all. I’m sure that you know more about this than I do, but what about the push server that apple has setup? I thought that I remembered them saying that apps could be setup to have their updates filtered through apple’s push server instead of having the apps constantly checking for updates.
also, here is the feed that is not working:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/14485906.rss
Dave, Apples Push Notification System has not yet even reached beta yet. Another issue with the Push Notification System is that all it can do is notify, it won’t actually allow us to do anymore than send a single number to the iPhone. We won’t be able to send feed items.
If enough people complain to Apple about allowing background processes and Apple changes their policy we could work just like the Mail application. Until then we can only work within the limitations that Apple has given us.
I tried loading up the feed you posted and it looks like it is password protected. Feeds cannot load any password protected RSS feeds at this time.
Mike
ok. sounds good.
I bought Feeds yesterday and it’s great. Just a thing, could catch all the feeds that can be found in a blog (i.e. post AND Comments). To write the complete url is very complicated sometimes
Sheldon, Thanks for the feedback! Take a look at this post: http://feeds.prime31.com/Blog/feeds-095-finally-available-in-the-app-store-plus-new-features/
It has a method to add feeds using a combination of your computer and Feeds and may help out with those big URLs.
Mike
Hello,
i’ve posted in the previous blog post, there is a problematic feed which doesn’t refresh. You told me to send the link over, so here it is:
https://www.hotspotsystem.com/rss/test/c626f7fb86cbc8ec52cb8d86f46449f4.xml
For me it’s showing entries from 30th, September, while there are only entries from today now. I guess you will see the latest entries for the first time, but after that it will scramble if you don’t see the feed for a few hours/days.
The time stamp from some feeds were wrong shown as “Jan 1 1970, 8:00am”. Can you take a look?
Hi Fan, It looks like the feed has the incorrect format for the date. The proper format for the date is: ‘Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:30:02 +0000′ and the feed has the date listed as: ’2008/10/06 10:59:23′. Our parser probably defaults to Jan 1 1970 which is the start of the epoch because it can’t parse the date.
Mike
I’ve just purchased the latest update 0.96. Things work pretty well and definitely worth a 5 star review. Just a couple of suggestions to consider: it’ll be good to have the date and time of the feed displayed when in the detail view of a feed. Also, the up/down button would be better positioned if they are at the bottom of the screen for ease of reach of the thumb, having them at the top of the screen means your thumb/finger will be obstructing part of the screen.. otherwise great stuff…
Howdy. Kudos on the new version; I know it’s silly, but I really like having the folder count.
Minor bug, and very little to go on, but I lost badging (on Springboard) for no apparent reason. I had read everything and the badge went away. Went back in next time and quit with plenty of unread items — and no springboard badge. Started and exited Feeds a few times. Doublechecked that badging was still set in prefs. Nada. Rebooted phone. Badges came back again (after running Feeds after the reboot).
(Sounds more like a Springboard problem than Feeds, but I figured I’d pass it on anyway just in case….)
Anyhoo, looking forward to google reader implementation. Feeds rocks.
Richo, Thanks for the feedback. We compile a list of all feature requests and work on them from the most popular on down so consider your suggestions on the list.
Mike
Brett, We appreciate the feedback. It definitely sounds like the issue you had was related to the Springboard and not something that Feeds could have been involved with.
Mike
Kudos! Great app- I easily use it far more than any other app. The only real hitch I have is that at least once a day a random feed will display 100 new articles, even if I’ve already marked most of them as read and there are actually only a handful of real unread ones.
I really like being able to read a full article in feeds, rather than Safari- it’s a great feature. Is it possible to add a back button to the view page? Sometimes I accidentally hit a link in an article and it launches that page, giving me no way to get back to the previous page without having to go all the way to the feed page, pick the article and relaunch it.
This is a wonderful app. I bagged Byline in favor of feeds. Byline just released its 2.0, so I tried it again. I re-bagged it. Great work!
Regards,
Scott
Scott, thanks for the kind words. We are aware of the oddity with some RSS feeds getting 100 new articles on update when there really aren’t that many new unread items. It happens when one of the sites changes a title of one of the feed items. We use the title and feed URL to figure out what has been read or not for sites that don’t provide a legit identifier. We hope to have a fix with the next release if all goes well.
Mike
Great work!
I’m a new customer as of yesterday (and, yes, I will post a review in the app store as well, LOL), but I wanted to offer my thanks here as well. I’ve been waiting for the RSS applications on the iPhone to mature a bit, and it seems as if they’ve finally done so. “Feeds” is the first one which is both speedy and stable enough to be usable, as well as flexible enough to meet most people’s needs – as well as pretty attractive, too!
The only major missing feature I can think of would be one you already have in development, apparently: sync with an online feed system. I have dozens of feeds, and for me, if I’ve spent a half-hour or more reading them on my home computer, and then I go out, I don’t want to have to re-delete from my iPhone all the ones I already read at home, because they aren’t marked as read in my iPhone reader app.
This was the one killer feature of the otherwise-unstable NetNewsWire app, as well as of Byline. Unfortunately, Byline is determinedly FUGLY, and doesn’t allow folders OR reading only single feeds. I don’t know if you’ve considered or investigated the possibility of having choices of syncs – the three I can think of would be Bloglines, Google and NewsGator/NetNewsWire, but if a way could be worked out to offer a choice of entering in account information for any of those three, you would have a world-beater of an app on your hands. Feeds is already arguably the strongest and most flexible app currently available, but that would make it untouchable.
One other minor feature? An OPML-upload feature, like Pro RSS (through a browser) would allow people who don’t have (or don’t want) to subscribe to online services like Google or NewsGator to be able to quickly and easily upload what might be (like me) dozens of feeds, without having to laboriously enter them one at a time in Feeds (using the iPhone’s small virtual keyboard).
But these are merely wish-list items. For now, GREAT work: love the landscape format, love the ability to change “skins,” love the categorization possible. And oh yeah – the fact that it works swiftly and doesn’t crash all the time. That’s pretty good, too ;o)
Lars, thanks for the feedback! We have been working hard on Google Reader support which is just about ready. There are a few issues to overcome (read more here: http://feeds.prime31.com/Blog/google-reader-integration-status/) but it should be ready by Christmas.
Once we have Google Reader support done you will be able to use Reader to import/export feeds via OPML. Currently, we only have plans to support Reader but if we get some demand for other services we will certainly consider adding them.
Mike
This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.