After a hiatus to Japan for 2 weeks we are back on the prowl getting Google Reader integration wrapped up.  As we work through adding functionality we are of course coming to some roadblocks that are requiring us to make some decisions on what to include and what to scrap.  The biggest problem we are having is with offline mode and synching properly when there is no internet connection.  Unlike the non-reader part of Feeds, we don’t have a way to ask Google for all posts that came after x.  We instead, have to download a whole bunch of extra posts which is quite slow over Edgel

The best proposal that we have come up with so far is the following:  add an option to the Settings screen that would toggle online/offline mode.  If offline mode is selected, each time Feeds is opened if there is an internet connection available it will download and store a user definable number of items per feed to store for use offline.  If there is no connection available, Feeds will just pull from the already downloaded items.  One drawback is that Mark All Read will not work in this mode because when you are online again and we go to sync with Google, the “All” part can be quite different that it was when the button was touched.

When using online mode, Feeds will not pre-fetch any feed items and will only retrieve items if requested.  This will speed up application startup and there will be no delay for syncing either.  It’s only drawback is that it request an internet connection which for almost all of our users isn’t a problem.

If anyone has any feedback on what you want to see leave it here.

UPDATE: An anonymous user gave us a little tip that basically makes this post irrelevant.  We will give some more information on our findings in a few days.