Comments on: Feeds Version 1.7 Sent Off to Apple

By: MikeC

MikeC — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 06:51:14 +0000

Thanks Apple … that too a while … v1.7 just appeared in the appstore for me, updated.

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:07:52 +0000

@Victor, re-submitting usually angers the Gods at Apple and they put you back to the bottom of the queue. We have been working hard on 1.8 in the downtime though and I just posted a post with some screenshots and a feature list at: http://www.prime31.com/iphone/feeds-1-8-sneek-peek-if-apple-ever-finishes-reviewing-the-1-7-update/

By: Victor Evans

Victor Evans — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:57:24 +0000

Have you tried re-submitting the app? Or better yet, just submitting 1.8? Or is that against Apple’s policies? This swipe to star sensitivity is killing me…

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:30:06 +0000

@Tay, ‘interval to back sync’ is all items. Google doesn’t let us distinguish between read or unread items so we have to download them all and sort them out.

By: Tay

Tay — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:27:09 +0000

Just a little more clarification re: “interval to back sync”…is that unread items since the last sync or all items? Thanks!

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:12:01 +0000

@caa100, exactly correct. If you open Feeds at 6:00pm and your ‘interval to back sync’ is set at 2 hours Feeds will download all items since 4:00pm.

By: caa100

caa100 — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:01:51 +0000

So “interval to back sync” controls how far back in time the app looks when syncing?

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:03:58 +0000

@Tim, folder and feed hiding with no items is done and we have been testing it for over a week along with a ton of other updates. One day, Apple may actually finish reviewing version 1.7 so we can send 1.8 off to them and wait another month for them to review that update. I’ll post some pictures and a quick rundown on what’s new in a few days.

For old items showing up as unread it is almost always a case of your settings not being tweaked. Try changing the ‘interval to back sync’ setting to a higher number. The way that you end up with items that are unread in Feeds but read on Google Reader is when you open Feeds and sync up a bunch of items and leave some unread. If you then go and read them in Google Reader and then open Feeds at some point in the future further than ‘interval to back sync’ you will end up with stray unread items. The way to fix it is to set a higher ‘interval to back sync’ which will slow down syncs a bit but your unread counts will be more accurate.

We have been thinking about just automatically marking all items as read that are older than the ‘interval to back sync’ whenever you sync. This would solve the stray unread items at the expense of not being fully accurate. If we play around with it and it seems to work perhaps it will make it in a future update, but at this point it seems like a scary change.

By: Mike (admin)

Mike (admin) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:11:52 +0000

@caa100, Feeds shouldn’t add much time to your sync at all. We do save a few files when syncing but even in the worst of cases they shouldn’t be large at all. I would guess that if you have a ton of RSS feeds and you set the number of items to store at 200 it would still only be about 4 – 5 megs, which is pretty small. There are certainly tons of apps out there that save data in the wrong place causing syncing to be slow. We only save the necessary files for syncing.

By: caa100

caa100 — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:51:44 +0000

Still loving feeds, and put up a positive review in the app store.

Wanted to note one thing:

Since I installed it, when I sync the iPhone using iTunes on windows, the backup phase takes WAY longer. (Used to be less than a minute, now can take 20 minutes or more).

I have heard that other apps that cache data have had this problem and resolved it (NY Times, ESPN, Facebook).