Feeds Version 1.22 Rejected
February 4, 2009 — Mike (admin)The newest update to Feeds was rejected due to improper use of table row selection and progress indicators. We have patched the update and resubmitted. What this means is that a lot of the features that were slated for version 1.3 will now be in 1.22. We figured we might as well send them off since they appear to be pretty solid. The icons were not yet finished so they will probably be redone in the next update.
Bittersweet news
. I really look forward to the update. I was wondering if you beta test your software? I happened to really enjoy unstable software and would like to help out the project. Let me know via email if I can do anything 
@Derick, we do beta test our software but at this time we do all testing in-house. It is a bit of a pain to build and distribute ad-hoc apps so we generally don’t bother much with it.
Mike
Ah, thanks for the news, saves me checking the appstore from my iPhone every 5 minutes waiting for Feeds to appear!
Does this normally take a couple of days?
v1.22 now on my iPhone
Reminder to people to REBOOT after installing/upgrading to avoid crashes!
WOW it’s fast this version. I immediately switched back to using my Google account. There used to be an annoying delay when returning to the main screen where the unread count would not disappear immediately. It’s now gone the moment you return to the main screen
Mike, only issue I see so far is with the preview text. I can email example screenshots if you can give me an address. Or just try appcraver.com or engadget.com feeds… There are a lot of broken sentences and also it is showing all HTML code instead of the PLAIN text.
I think it just needs parsing into PLAIN text before you show the preview to avoid it showing HTML or being truncated by new line characters etc.
Can live with that until next update as it’s already so much faster and more usable having preview text so thanks for this!
@Federov, feel free to email the pics over to me at questions (at) prime31.com. I am guessing that engadget.com and appcraver.com both use a ton of HTML. In order to keep things moving smoothly, we decided to filter HTML for the first 200 characters of each feed. It was a tradeoff between performance and proper preview text display. Perhaps we will up the number a bit to make sure HTML rich feeds like the two mentioned show up correctly. The only downside is that it will take a tiny bit longer to generate the feed item list.
Mike
I just updated tonight 2/6 and Feeds no longer works. My Google reader feeds show, but no posts. I have reset and everything, but cannot get posts to show up.
@Steve, are you set to manual sync? That might be the issue. Either way, try pressing the refresh button from the main feed list screen. Depending on how many feeds you have, you may need to do this more than once because we are limited in how many items we can fetch from Google at a time. Give it a bit of time to get synced up and then hopefully it will be business as usual.
Mike
yes after 10 minutes or so the post counts appeared, but there were no posts. then a few minutes later there were posts again. Whew! I really depend on
Feeds!
@Steve, glad to hear all is well. That first sync or 2 can take some time but every time thereafter it should be nice and quick with no more UI lockups anymore!
Mike
Feeds 1.22 seems like a terrible step back to me. I’ve tried rebooting and I’ve tried uninstalling. I get the wrong list of feeds when selecting categories, unread counts all over the place, feeds disappearing from the list. It’s terrible.
Please: enlist the help of some beta testers between releases. I really appreciate the drive to improve, but this release sucks very badly.
I’m fairly new to Feeds (just purchased this week), but I can say that I’m quite impressed with the app! The version I purchased earlier in the week did everything I needed with Google Reader except allow to star items from the All Feeds view. Well, 1.22 corrects that! Very nice and easy to use.
Only a couple of suggestions: The “Mark All as Read” option should default to the same behavior as Google Reader on iPhone (website) – it only marks as read the items currently on the screen, not every item whether viewed or not.
Also, it would be great to have a button in the app to switch between hiding and showing read items, similar to Google Reader. It’s a little inconvenient to have to exit the app and go to preferences to change this. I usually like a clean list without seeing read items, but I occasionally want to look back and star something I had seen earlier.
I also noticed on this version that the green folder icon is very tiny compared to the screenshots on iTunes. I prefer the larger folder icon.
Thanks!
Just done some more playing. Managed to get through a few feeds ok, and then the following happens:
Back out of a story, the top three or four subscription names blank out.
Return to the “root” list, and pick another group.
Get the same list of subs as above, with the top few missing again.
At this point I have to quit to make the app usable again. Versus the previous version which was slower but more stable.
There looks to be some good features in this version, and it is quicker for sure, but the bug mentioned above is killing the app for me.
@Dan, We are looking into the issue where the feed list has blank entries. I have not yet been able to reproduce the issue more than once in about 20 – 30 tries. It is very elusive. If you can provide the exact steps to reproduce the problem we will patch it up ASAP.
@Ricky, We have considered a ‘Mark these items read’ option like Google Reader does but there are some behind the scenes issues with it. Google uses their own method for marking just the on screen items as read which we cannot use. We would have to mark each item as read separately which would end up blasting a ton of requests out and both slowing down Feeds and eating away battery life. Google is planning on releasing a true API for Google Reader soon so we are hoping they give us the ability to mark items as read in a batch like they do with the Reader version they made for the iPhone.
Mike
@Ricky, disregard my last comment. I found a way to do batch mark as read and just implemented a new setting that lets you choose between the normal ‘Mark All Read’ or the new ‘Mark These Read’. After a round of testing it should make it out on the next update.
Mike
I’ve just gone into FEEDS for about the 5th time today. When I hit the refresh button it told me Sync was done at bottom as usual after a couple of seconds but no UNREAD counts appeared on the main screen.
Curious, I hit my iPhone home button immediately to quit the app, then loaded it again and the UNREAD counts were now there without me doing another refresh.
Earlier today I guess something similar, after doing a refresh and not seeing any counts, instead of reloading the app like I did above, I hit the refresh button a 2nd time and the counts appeared.
I’ve also just seen the blank feed list issue for the first time. Quit the app, went back in and they were back again.
Hope you can track these issues down.
Regards.
1.22 user. Rebooted iphone. Feed count not reducing properly after clicking on a headline. Go back into same list article I just looked at says I never looked at that article. If I do a swipe to mark an article as read (nice new feature) then the count is updated properly. App crashed more than once when clicking the feeds button.
I think it might be linked to using “mark all read”. I used the app for a while without hitting that button, and couldn’t recreate it. After a few iterations of “view feeds, mark as read, back up, view feeds, mark as read…” it did the invisible feeds thing on me again.
I’ll keep banging away on it to see if I can find anything more decisive.
@Mike, Wow! That was fast! I’ll look forward to the udpate when it’s ready. I’m happier every day that I chose Feeds over Byline (the other app I was considering) as it appears that Feeds is being developed much more actively, and you are quite responsive to user feedback!
Another thing – I’m not sure if this can be changed, but I noticed that when I set the color scheme to anything but green, the green is still shown for a moment when the app starts. This may be due to the fact that apps display an image briefly while the actual app loads, but would this be something that could be fixed? Small issue, I know, but thought I’d mention it. Thanks again!
@Ricky, we can’t do anything about the splash screen colors. We only get to put one image as the splash page and we can’t change it. There are bug reports sent to Apple to allow developers to change the splash screen at will but there is no word from Apple yet.
Mike
@Mike, I understand. No problem. Thanks for your quick responses. The only other feature I can think of at this time to make Feeds perfect would be offline storage of full webpages (perhaps identified by starred items?), but that would probably require a great deal of work, if possible.
1.22 is crashing like crazy. I uninstalled it, did a reboot and then reinstalled. It’s nearly unusable right now. It’s very dissapointing. I bought it right before this release.
If I am reading an article in the feeds internal browser and press the items button (back button) it crashes. Sometimes, just touching the screen, crashes.
This seems like a good program and much faster than Byline. But the crashing is killing the experience.
@Navec, I apologize for the crashing issue you are having. Are you using Google Reader to sync or Feeds? Would you mind emailing crash logs over to us so we can see what the problem is? Your crash logs are located in the following location and they automatically get synced when you attache your iPhone to it’s USB cable:
* Mac OS X : ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/\AppData\Roaming\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/MobileDevice/
* Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\
* Windows Vista: C:\Users\
Mike
I had the “blank posts after update” issue too, but mashing the refresh button like a crack-addicted monkey seems to have solved it.
As an aside, a “new posts” thing on the root screen would be greatly appreciated.
I also have lots of crashes in the new version and it was definitely veey solud in the previous version. I also tried a reboot but it did not help
I’ve also had a few crashes, including one when going back to the All Feeds view after having viewed a post’s full webpage inline. Where should I send these? I don’t see an email address on the site. Thanks.
I’m also finding when I first load Feeds and hit the Refresh button, after it says it has done syncing there are no counts next to any of my folders.
I’m having to hit the refresh button a 2nd time for the counts to appear but then I’m also seeing it get confused and listing 50+ or 100+ unread counts next to something I only last read a couple of hours ago. When I view these feeds they are going back to Feb 6th so it’s showing me 2 days worth of feeds as unread.
I’m confident you’ll nail the issues Mike, sorry to inundate you!
Anyone with a crashing issue please send a crash log over to questions (at) prime31.com. We have not been able to get any crashes so if you can provide steps to reproduce and a crash log we will fix any issues ASAP.
The first load you may need to do a couple manual refreshes to prime the database and get it up to date but this should not be required after that.
Mike
@Everyone, I have found the crashing bug and fixed it. This is a pretty rare bug that would mostly affect users who have preview text on. Here comes a bit too much information, so stop reading if you just care that the bug is fixed. To trigger it, you have to drill down to a feed description and have used up enough memory to get the iPhone to take notice. Feeds will dump anything that is offscreen at this point to keep the interface snappy. When you go back a screen, Feeds had an issue resurrecting the view it had dumped. All is happy now.
If anyone reproduce the disappearing feed list bug please send over the exact steps on how to do it so that we can patch that up before the update goes live.
Mike
@Mike
When will the update post taking care of this bug? I like having the preview. I have turned it off to see if it makes a difference. I think I tried it yesterday.
@Navec, the update should be out pretty fast. We sent it off to Apple for review. They usually get things reviewed in under a week.
Please do report back when the update comes out to let us know if all is fixed.
Mike
What email address do I use to send my crash files?
Mike,
I have noticed the following issues since the update (v1.22, Using Feeds to Sync):
1. – When using categories/folders to organize my feeds, the app constantly crashes and a reboot of my phone is required to get it working again. Folders also cause the feed icons to stretch and become distorted, almost covering the beginning of the feed title. After removing all categories/folders, the icons returned to normal and the app has not crashed one time.
2. – After reading feed items and returning to the main list of feeds, the items remain “unread”. The only solution I have found is to “swipe” the item BEFORE I read it.
3. – A couple of my feeds have many duplicates. I have used the “mark all read” option and a couple of syncs later, all items return (as duplicates) and are marked unread again.
Thank you for putting so much time and effort into the development of Feeds!! I can’t wait for the next update.
@Tammy, We will look into 1 some more but as of now we have not been able to reproduce it. 2 is fixed in the update that Apple is reviewing right now. Mark All Read and swiping will work temporarily until the update comes out. 3 is more than likely related to our server maintenance earlier this week. All of our old data had to be purged which would make it so the server doesn’t know what feed items you already downloaded. This should be resolved either by now or shortly.
Mike