Feeds Version 1.73 sent to Apple
November 9, 2009 — Mike (admin)A fairly minor update was just sent to Apple a few hours ago. Fixed in the update are:
- unread count issue when marking an item as read
- an odd issue that comes up when portrait only is set and you hold your iPhone sideways while navigating to the article view page
Edit: Just a short 21 days after we submitted the update to Apple version 1.73 has officially gone live in the App Store. You should get update notifications in the App Store shortly.
That’s great news Mike! I’ll be looking forward to this update! Keep up the good work, Feeds is a great App!
Hi
Just a quick question. Is there a font size option for the full article similar to NY Times app? I find reading a problem in most RSS readers as the full article fonts are always smaller than the RSS feed itself.
Thanks
@A Wang, you get 4 font size choices for the actual article in the settings for Feeds.
Thanks! Will look forward to it. I hope that it will be able to parse more feeds. Right now, this feed —-> http://feeds.feedburner.com/Hullabaloo cannot be displayed in Feeds. They do some funky formatting, I guess…but it will display in NetNewsWire, so I know it can be done. This is one of my must-read feeds, and I would LOVE for it to be readable in Feeds, but unfortunately, it’s a deal breaker for me until it is. Any thoughts?
I guess this is the most appropriate place to ask this question -
Is there any way to get Feeds to sync all my unread items since the beginning of time? Right now it seems like it only gets a couple of days’ worth of unread items, and I was looking forward to having a feed reader that integrated with Read it Later to be able to go through my backlog of unread items.
Also, “Back sync” is not a great name for this control if that’s what it means. Maybe “Sync items from the last: “5 days” “2 days” etc.
@Joe, neither Feeds nor Google Reader can sync all items since the beginning of time. Feeds will only store the amount of items that you specify in the settings. You can set the number of items to store per feed and the ‘interval to back sync’ for lack of a better term.
@Mike – Alright, but the “interval to back sync” prevents me getting the number of items that I specify in the settings, so in Feeds it’s like a significant number of elements are invisible because they’re too old.
Hi Mike, are there any news as to when we can expect this new release to appear on the App Store?
@Stef, Apple has been incredibly slow the last month or two so we have no idea when the update will get through them. It has already been 10 days so hopefully it won’t be more than a week more. Apple is getting really hard to work with these days…
I’m starting to believe Apple is starting to get under a lot of fire lately and they are unfortunately falling victim of their own success by doing a nice “Microsoft” of themselves… They became king of the hill with regards to smartphone and instead of continuing to work hard in keeping it there, they simply sat back and relaxed thinking that their job was done and that it was perfect as it is…
The problem for them is that we all know that there is no such thing as something “perfect”. As such, problems have started to be identified on the App Store, the App reviewing process, the iPhone hardware and the iPhone OS… Basically, they are dropping the ball!
@Stef, Apple did some amazing things for developers by giving us a platform and a delivery system for the applications on it. They are most certainly scaring away a lot of developers who would like to focus on the iPhone platform but cant. How can you have your primary income come from a source where you can’t know beforehand if your application will pass their guidelines? How can you plan a project budget when your application could take 14 days or 3 months to get approved? It isn’t sustainable for a developer who wants to be able to afford to eat. I am hoping as time goes on and the piles and piles of crap-app makers realize they aren’t going to get rich anytime soon in the App Store start to taper off the number of apps will decrease drastically. My fear is that it will go the other way: the good developers will move on to more sustainable platforms and the crap-app developers will fill the App Store with useless applications.
end rant.
I understand your pain! It is quite depressing to see such a promising platform be handled in such a bad way… I’m really looking forward for the update to come out as Feeds is not working properly anymore for me!
Why does Feeds always get shafted? Other updates come out in a matter of days; Feeds always seems to get pushed to the back of the queue.
Steve.
@Steve, it sure does seem like we get shafted a lot. We hear a lot of people who have really long review periods (a month or more) then some that get reviews through in a week. It seems to be totally random. We just released a new app (Dogoto http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dogoto-dog-photos-for-everyone/id333414655?mt=8) that is ultra simple and consists of just a bunch of pictures of dogs in a neat photo viewer. It took over 2 months to get through the review process. Totally insane…
Quick question for you Mike! Have you got any news with regards to where your new version of Feeds is with Apple? A lot of other applications have been submitted to Apple after you did and already approved and posted on the App Store… It really looks like they may have made a mistake and forgotten about your App. You fixed things and did not actually had major new features, which should make the review and approval process that much easier! I really hope they don’t forget you and Feeds.
@Stef, Apple doesn’t communicate with developers at all. We literally receive no information whatsoever unless our app is rejected or accepted. They recently added a website where we can check the status of a review but it is sorely lacking in information. The statuses are ‘waiting for review’, ‘in review’, ‘rejected’, ‘available for sale’. Feeds shifted from ‘waiting for review’ to ‘in review’ about a week ago. Either the system is total BS or they are spending a week reviewing one app. I think I know which one it is…
@Mike, Lol! I really hope Apple would automatically receive an email transcript every time developers and customers would voice their discontentment on the web. Their servers would probably have been permanently down for “self-induced” DDOS attacks due to their lack of action to fix the situation properly in the last couple of weeks (or is it months already)?
In any case, I hope Feeds gets approved ASAP as I am out of a properly working RSS app right now which is a tool I now use and need for work on a daily basis…
On a positive note in during the extended review period we got the next update ready. Not much for it but we have ‘add note’ going in there and we finally pinpointed and fixed an issue with very specific settings and the ‘get 20 more’ button.
Got the update, thanks. But now the update applications badge won’t go away, either in iTunes or on the phone. I have updated several times but no joy. Any ideas?
Still seems to be a problem with airplane mode — when I enter that mode, none of the folders show up — only feeds that are not within folders.
Startup time is also *really* slow on my 3G. The loading box only appears for a second, but you can see the activity indicator going for quite a while after, and then an even longer delay before the items show up…
@Chris, try giving your iPhone a shake when in airplane mode on the feed list. As for startup time, we havent modified anything that should effect that in this release. If it continues to be slow try to delete and redownload Feeds because it may be a corrupt database file from downloading the update.
@stevejackson
This has been happening with the appstore lately, I do not think feeds is the culprit. I’ve seen it with several updates. Odd.