I just got an email from Apple minutes ago saying Feeds version 1.31 has been approved. It should start showing up in App Stores within a few hours. This update has been a painful one for us to wait out and for all users as well. Thanks for your patience on this one and enjoy the update!
My previous posting was a secret ploy to get it to appear
Thanks Mike, nice to be back using Feeds again – just installed the update.
Yeah! I love the left swiping to create a star, and that you put the Add Feed button on the bottom left, just as I requested. I suspect I wasn’t the only one. Thanks.
Good job on this release. So far it’s been much more stable than the last. Haven’t been able to recreate either of the killer bugs yet either.
It’s not all roses though: unread counts seem to be way off again, and I’m seeing lots of articles as unread when I’ve read them online. Maybe Reader is having a funny turn; I’ll keep an eye on it. It’s certainly easier to work around these bugs than the previous ones.
No crashes or disappearing feed articles yet but unread counts seem out each time.
e.g. BBC News feed showed 1 unread yet there were 5 in there.
Others are showing similar mismatches.
I’ve got sync set to 5 mins and the Sync back set to 1/2 hour as recommended for someone who opens Feeds frequently.
@Dan, unread counts are very dependent on your settings. What is your ‘refresh interval’ set to and what do you have set for ‘interval to back sync’? Tweaking these two settings to the proper numbers for your use patterns is key.
See the post (http://www.prime31.com/iphone/adjusting-feeds-settings-for-your-reading-style/) for more information on what your settings should be.
Mike
I’m also now seeing these unread count discrepancies. In one category it said I had 1 unread but, when I drilled down to feed list, one of the feeds said 1, the other 2, and the one with 2 really had none unread when I checked.
Thank you – this version is vastly more stable. It hasn’t crashed yet. It’s awesome.
My unread counts are way off, but that’s cosmetic. I think it’s because I have multiple labels on many feeds.
I LOVE this app.
Ciao!
@EyeRonik1, glad it is more solid for you. The next update should be even better.
@Everyone with unread issues, can someone try going into the Settings application and turning ON the ‘Reset on next start’ setting? Not everyone needs to do this…just someone who is feeling experimental. The next startup after you do this will take a while to sync because it will be starting from scratch. See if that takes care of the unread counts being off.
Mike
I’ll try it and report back.
I love the rate you are releasing these updates even though Apple aren’t quite so obliging.
One thing I’ve noticed with the last couple of releases is there’s a lag from syncing being completed to the unread message labels being displayed and then another longer lag when I select a folder and display all items, there can be a 10 second delay before the items are displayed. I don’t have a large number of feeds and I guess I began to notice it when 1.3 came out.
On reflection, I’ve probably made more of this than is necessary as the delay only appears on the first feed you access, subsequant feeds appear instantly.
So far so good since using the reset option. Unread counts haven’t got out of sync all day
Good news: that seems to work! I’ve reset everything, and read through 150 or so new items with no problems. Unread counts were spot on, no blank feed problems or crashes. Really good stuff.
One thing I did notice is a couple of crashes while viewing the feed’s content, but I guess this is Safari instabilities and can’t be helped? It’s tolerable given that relaunching Feeds goes right back to the article you’re viewing, which is brilliant.
A couple of feature requests now stability is good:
Currently we’ve got Starred Items, All Items, and Shared Items before feed folders – it would be nice to have an all unread up there too. In the interests of not taking up too much space, could Starred and Shared sit side by side, and All Items, and All Unread Items do the same? (so all 4 in a 2×2 grid). That way there’s more space for feed folders.
I’d love to be able to swipe and mark as read on a feed folder, maybe if I know I’m not interested in its contents.
It might also be worth having configuration “profiles” in the settings, so “frequent reader”, “once a day” etc, in a dropdown list, so that you can pick the one that best applies to you.
Great work, loving this latest update. Best Feed Reader on the app store.
Dan beat me to it regarding maybe having usage profiles – reading your post about usage settings I think for the average user who purchases Feeds they are not going to understand your explanation of those settings – I think it needs simplifying big time as none of the other rss apps I’ve seen have settings so *complex*.
But loving this version for the speed and stability again – bring on the next one with the cleaner toolbar, direct email etc!!!
Emailing links comes through without the carriage return. I emailed a link to myself and got this:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,497707,00.htmlMichelle Fry sees a national mortgage bailout plan that appears to reward people who bought more house than they could afford and can’t pay their bills, and she not happy about it.
@Dan, we already have some ideas for masking the settings. They have gotten to be too many for the average user. Of course, as soon as they are gone the power users will be disappointed. Out only difficulty now is defining them in 3 words or less. The Settings app doesn’t allow much room for extraneous text but we have a few idea we are going to try.
@John, all links are emailed as the straight HTML from the RSS feed in order to keep links, formatting and images intact. The way carriage returns are shown from that point on is up to the particular mail client that you use. Most will not, as you have mentioned, display normal carriage returns.
Mike
My Unread counts are correct, but when I open a feed, it shows all visible items as unread. This happens everytime I open it and only since the update. I use Google Reader with Feeds. Should I do what Dan did?
@Jeffrey, try the ‘Reset on next start’ option. It sounds like a few peoples databases didn’t transfer properly on update. The next startup will take a bit longer to resync with Google. Let me know if that does it for you.
Mike
@Mark, the first time you load a feed, it does take a bit of time. There is only so much processing power in that little phone and it takes a second to catch up. Once it is loaded once, we reuse everything to make it faster. We are always working on optimizing though, so if we can speed something up we certainly will.
Mike
This new version is great! It is much more stable than 1.22 and I haven’t noticed any problems! Thanks!
One thing I’d like to request for a future version is a different way of checking of Feeds is Offline. Often I’ll go into the app and be reading some items and want to mark all as read. For whatever reason, the network I’m on takes a second or two to authenticate but that’s enough time for Feeds to decide that its offline and so I have to quit out of it and go back in for it to update. Could you maybe have it check again at specific intervals or when the Mark All As Read button is clicked?
Thanks,
Garibaldi
@Garibaldi, we could probably add something like that. Currently, Feeds will try just once. We could maybe add a button on the main screen that will allow you to touch it when you have internet access again. This way, those individuals who are offline for sure won’t have to worry about it trying to send out requests every so often wasting battery power when they know they don’t have internet access and won’t for a while.
Mike
I’m very close to purchasing. I love the Instapaper integration. Any plans for Delicious support?
Newb question. How do I find the settings in the app? I’ve looked everywhere.
@Lola, we have not considered adding Delicious support. As always, if there is enough demand we will put it in but not until after the next update. We need to rework the details page to make room for additions.
@Ron, just go to your Springboard (desktop) and touch the Settings application. There will be an entry for Feeds in there.
Mike
@Mike, that’s the perfect idea with the refresh button – that way as you said battery is not wasted
Thanks for the quick answer, Mike. I hope others have (or will) requested Delicious too, as I would really like to see it included in Feeds’ offerings. Would make the app A+ for me.
Mike
I took on board your comments, but I was sure performance had suffered over the last couple of upgrades so uninstalled the app and re-downloaded it. Hey presto it’s back to it’s zippy best.
If anyone else thinks it’s began to slow down a bit, it might be worth trying this.
I never had that link/text merge problem prior to this version.
How come we can’t swipe to unstar in the starred items list?
Hi, and thanks for a great program. I’m a heavy user of Google Reader, and have been looking for the “ultimate” iPhone RSS client for a while now. Feeds is definitely the best of the bunch, but there are some things I’d like to suggest. I hope these ideas are taken in the spirit in which they’re intended — they’re definitely not complaints, but this program is so good that I feel just a few changes could make it perfect — at least for what I’m looking for.
1. Unread feeds only. The biggest feature I’m missing is the ability to display only feeds that have unread items. I believe that’s the default setting for Google Reader, so I don’t understand why it’s not a standard feature in Feeds. I have a long list of RSS feeds, and it’s a pain having to scroll down through all of them to find the ones that have unread items. There should also be a way (inside the program) to switch back and forth between showing all feeds and just the unread ones, like there is in Google Reader.
2. Splashscreen. I never saw the old splashscreen, but I take it that everyone hated it so you replaced it with a screenshot of the program with nothing in the list. This is of course a problem if you’ve changed the color scheme to something else like blue. Switching from green to blue on startup just looks silly — maybe someone can just make a simple logo to show while it’s loading. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it’s not a screenshot.
3. Colors. The green just looks ugly. The default should be blue — my guess is that most of your users are changing to blue anyway, to stay with the normal iPhone colors. Why not make it the default, and then let people choose crazy colors like green if they really want to. Stick with the iPhone standards — it makes the app look more professional.
4. Progress bars. There are a couple of places where we see “Loading” messages or popups saying it’s loading, or status messages about syncing. First, all those methods are inconsistent. And second, there need to be more of them. Maybe it’s because I have a lot of feeds, but I find that when I first load the program after not having used it in a while, it takes some time for the first unread counts to appear. When it seems like it’s done, I go into a folder and often find that the unread counts haven’t finished loading there. Or I go into an individual feed that should have unread articles, but nothing is displayed. If I wait a while, they eventually show up. All of these places need progress indicators. Preferably something showing how much time is remaining, like a progress bar or a percentage number. At the very minimum, it should say what it’s doing, like “Loading articles”, or “Syncing feed”, or whatever. There are too many times I find myself looking at an empty page wondering what it’s doing. I don’t mind if it takes a long time — I expect that with a lot feeds — but it should tell me what it’s doing.
5. Settings. I find it a pain having to exit the app just to change its settings. Maybe there’s some technical reason why it’s easier or better to put the settings off the springboard instead of inside the app? But from a user’s point of view, if I want to change something like the font size, I don’t want to have to exit the app, go back to the first page of icons, into Settings, down to Feeds, change the setting, then back to the icons, then to the page with Feeds on it, back into the program, watch the ugly green screenshot, and finally continue reading where I left off. A “settings” icon somewhere on the main page could take me to all the same settings, but inside the program. And things like changing the font size could be done by some creative finger swipe patterns, without having to leave the current page.
6. About page. Maybe I just missed it, but I can’t find anywhere in the app (or in the settings) where it tells me the version of the program or who made it. Or the URL to the web site, or this blog.
Ok, that’s my Christmas wishlist. I hope some of the suggestions are helpful, anyway. Again, thanks for a great program.
Russell
@Russell, thanks for the list of suggestions. To address your suggestions:
1. Feeds technically has an option in Settings for displaying only unread items. This will, however, only display unread items throughout the entire application. That may or may not suit your reading style.
2. I personally liked the old splash screen. It gave Feeds character. Perhaps we can whip up a less green, more simple version…
3. The green is ugly to some, but it sure does stand out in the dark! We found that most people actually use black believe it or not. Everyone likes their own colors which is why we allow the choices.
4. Progress bars would be wonderful! The only problem is that Google doesn’t give us enough information in the headers to make them. We tried hard to add them. We can ‘fake’ them but it just doesn’t seem right to do. We are actually going to be putting in an indicator for the first sync on startup. This one can take a bit because we have to download all your items (which has some progress text as you know) then parse them all and save them. Once all that is done, we display the unread counts. So, yes, this needs some better indications that we will be adding.
5. Settings are hopefully the kind of thing that you toy with for a few days then never have to change. In addition, almost all of the settings require a restart to take effect so having them in the normal Settings.app seems to work. Otherwise, people would modify the settings and wonder why they have to restart or wonder why the changes didnt take effect immediately.
6. Totally need an about page.
We have a pretty hefty to-do list for the app that just got a few more items. Our main concerns now are simplifying the details page and pushing performance to the max. We are being very wary about adding any new features at this time for fear of having the whole kitchen sink in there. Selecting what should go in and what shouldn’t is becoming increasingly important but we have some excellent user feedback to figure out what everyone wants.
Mike
If you know most users go with black — myself included — why not default to black?
It would be nice if we had more font size options than just normal and large.
Hi Mike, thanks for the quick reply. Here’s followup to your followup:
1. You’re right, there is an option to display only unread items, but there’s not an option to display only feeds that have unread items. In other words, if a feed doesn’t have any unread items, I don’t want to see it in the feed list. I believe that’s the default behavior in Google Reader, and it’s definitely the way I use it since I have so many feeds that aren’t updated very often (friends, family, etc.) and I don’t want to have to scroll past all of them to find something to read.
4. Sounds like you’re on the right track for adding more status messages — even just saying what the program is doing, without a true progress bar, is a big help.
5. Ok about the settings. Font size is the main one I’d like to see made easier to change, but otherwise I can live with them being outside the app.
Of course, if you do add the option to display only unread feeds, it’d be nice to be able to quickly turn it off inside the app, for the rare case when I want to look back at an article that’s been marked as read, but the feed has no unread articles so I can’t get into the feed at all.
Glad to see you guys are working on it so hard. Thanks,
Russell
I’m pretty sure there’s a bug in the current version that’s causing starred items to appear as unread in Feeds.
So I read everything in the web interface, star stuff to revisit later, mark all as read. When Feeds syncs, the starred stuff is appearing as unread (bold) even though I’ve got show unread only turned on.
@Dan, I can’t seem to reproduce the issue. I use the online version of Reader a couple times during the day every day if for nothing else to make sure syncing is happy. Are you in the Starred items list or the regular list?
I’m still having the occassional problem of the program forgetting that I’d marked a bunch of feeds as read and showing them as unread (it is almost always exactly 100 read posts that get marked unread). I’m not using Google.
@Michael, we are aware of the issue with the 100 feeds unread. It only affects non-Google users. A HUGE portion of our users has switched to Google syncing so any bugs affecting the non-Google syncing are taking a bit longer than we would like to get to. We always prioritize by request count and there aren’t many people going the non-Google route so we don’t get many feature requests or bug reports for it.
Mike,
I may be at fault, but I noticed that I have a lot more “out of sync” feeds or feed items since the latest version. I’ve read through your post on how to configure the application with regards to our type of usage. I’ve tried multiple settings, but I simply can’t seem to be able to get things nicely in sync. Has there been any changes that could have affected the way sync was behaving with Google Reader? (Maybe even a change from our friends at Google…)
@Stef, it is always possible. I will keep an eye out for any changes or sync issues.
So, I just downloaded Feeds after the Macworld review. It has a nice appearance, but doesn’t seem to like either my iphone or my google reader feeds. It sets up fine and shows my unread feeds, but when I enter any single feed to read it it is blank.
There are no items to be read, despite unread items in my google reader account online and showing in feeds. Even if I go to all feeds for a specific folder, zip, zilch nada, nothing.
I tried the reset on next start option, but again nothing to read.
Any thoughts?
@Brandon, What you are experiencing may be related to a bug we found yesterday in the iPhone OS and the way it handles cookies from Safari. Can you try opening the Settings application from your Springboard (Desktop). Go to the Safari settings and select the ‘Clear Cookies’ settings. Open Feeds after you do that and touch the refresh button if it doesn’t refresh on it’s own. Let me know if that does it for you.