Version 1.32 Sent to Apple
March 10, 2009 — Mike (admin)Last night we sent off the final revision of version 1.32 to Apple. Not much has changed in this version. The big addition is the ability to send emails from in Feeds without having to open Mail and leave the app. This has proved to be a wonderful time saver for us and we don’t know how we lived without it. We would appreciate any bug reports on the email sending feature as soon as it gets in your hands. Though we have thoroughly tested it there is no possible way we could test all possible scenarios.Along with sending emails, we added a toggle in the Settings.app that will allow you to choose between sending the email from Feeds or opening Mail.app. You can also choose to get either an audio queue (the ‘whoooosh’ sound) or a visual cue when the email is sent.
Another little feature trickled in as well. There is a lack of space for buttons on the details page and we haven’t finished the reworking of it yet so we needed a way to be able to get a back button in there for the web browser without using any space. A tricky situation indeed. Tricky situations require equally creative solutions and we figured we’ve got an iPhone so lets use all the features it has. To go back in the web browser all you need to do is shake your iPhone now. A bit odd indeed but at least it doesn’t use up any precious UI space. This will only work once you have navigated at least one page into a permalinks web site.
That covers the biggest features in this update…
Are we unable to see what a friend has shared with us? I just started using that feature in Reader and realized it wasn’t coming through to Feeds.
For which version have you slated the oldest-to-newest reading order setting?
@John, at this time you can only view your own shared items. Oldest-to newest is already in version 1.31. Check the Settings application to change your feed item order.
Mike, it’s not in the settings. Does anyone else see it?
Hi,
Are you planning on implementing image caching in Feeds? I love your support for Instapaper (now if only Google would integrate that from a desktop browser!), but I prefer the way that Byline caches not only entire pages for offline viewing, but images within the article body. Or have I just missed a setting somewhere that turns this on? With this in place, I could see myself never flip-flopping away from Feeds again, whereas at the moment I go back and forth between Byline, Netnewswire, and Feeds. Please help me recover some sanity!
Thanks,
Ian
@m_s, We are planning on putting image caching in Feeds. It’s on our to-do list but it isn’t the most requested feature and we work top down from most requested to least so it may be a few more updates before it gets in there.
Nice review in Macworld today. This is, hands down, my favorite app!
Regards,
Scott
http://www.macworld.com/article/139265/2009/03/feeds.html?lsrc=rss_main
Mike, on top of the missing oldest-to-newest setting, I think I’ve hit on another bug. Two days ago I marked two items as shared in Google Reader and also read them. Both Reader and Feeds are set to only show me unread items. Since then, both those items have randomly appeared as unread in Feeds but never in Reader.
@John, we will by trying to duplicate the bug with shared items. As for the missing setting, are you sure you are using the latest version?
I’m 100% certain. Does any other user see an oldest-to-newest setting in Feeds?
John, I’m with you, unless I’m missing something obvious I can’t see an oldest to newest setting either.
Mike, where exactly should it be in the settings screen?
@John and @Mark, perhaps my brain is so scrambled that I don’t even know what version is out in the wild anymore. I *KNOW* it is in the version Apple is reviewing right now. I am not 100% sure it is in version 1.31. It is located in Settings -> Feeds -> Google Settings -> Sort Feed Items
I don’t know if this has been reported but I added some more feeds and the sync is now behaving very badly. I have 17 unread in Reader yet when I sync it comes back with 340 unread. This only began recently and the only thing that changed was the addition of some more feeds.
Sync has started behaving a little with version 1.22 and more so with 1.31. I don’t know if it’s Feeds or Google themselves though as Google does have a record of sometimes changing things without telling anyone about it, whether it will break something or not!
Feeds v1.32 just this moment appeared on appstore and installed. I can confirm the oldest-to-newest setting is present in v1.32.
Hi Mike, I have good news! Like many others (from comments I’ve read on the app store and in older posts here), I had been finding the last few upgrades awful – performance was slow, feeds were not getting updated after sync, whole phone became unresponsive and required a reboot (ten seconds on the two buttons). I had actually stopped using the app. However, today I deleted Feeds and re-installed the latest version (1.32), and now it’s working perfectly! I suspect there was some data or settings that was causing this behaviour. I suggest you recommend on the page in the app store that users who have upgraded from old versions (I started back in January I think, whatever version that was) should delete and re-install. Remind them that they lose very little, since all feeds are synced with Google anyway. Thanks!
@Brian, thanks for the heads up. I am guessing some people are getting corrupt downloads which would cause the issues that are being reported. I will certainly let everyone know the easy fix.
I’ve done a Reset All in settings as the counts were wrong since the new update. Will keep an eye on it.
Resized images is nice – are you stretching them rather than keeping the correct aspect ratio though?
Nice work.
@Federov, currently the resize doesn’t do aspect ratio. Before going through the trouble of finding a solution that works for all (or most) feeds I wanted to be sure I was on the right path so the aspect ratio will be off. If everyone has good success with the current resizing, I will add proper aspect ratio detection.
Mike, I was very pleased to see that the e-mail-from-Feeds option works great in 1.32! …And then fairly disappointed to learn that you can only e-mail a single address at a time.
Any plans of changing this?
Also, I discovered a bug I was able to repeat with 100% reliability: Start entering an e-mail address so the autocomplete comes up. Choose from the autocomplete list. Then try to delete by holding down the backspace key. Every time I tried this the program would hard crash to the home page.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m very pleased with the update in spite of this!
Best,
-joe
@Joe, thanks for the bug report. I will patch that up today. Technically you can send an email to multiple addresses. We just haven’t made it as fancy as the Mail app yet. You can send to as many addresses as you would like but you will only get autocomplete on the first one. Just separate the addresses by a comma like this: ‘addy@stuff.com,address2@stuff.com,address3@stuff.com’.
We will fancy it up in future updates but we wanted to get this in everyone’s hands as quickly as possible to it isn’t fully feature complete.
@Mike, I was looking for details of the offline features of Feeds, but I could not see if the app save the whole linked page of each feed. Does the app depends on Instapaper to do offline reading?
Thanks,
Maiquel
@Maiquel, Feeds does not save the entire page for offline reading, it only saves the feed descriptions for reading offline. InstaPaper works quite good at caching offline webpages so you can certainly use it for offline reading.
Hi Mike-
1.32 is running even quicker than 1.31, but every time I try to send an email from Feeds I get an error saying that login/password is invalid. I made sure that my Google pswd was the same as my mail pswd, as well as mail address. Is there something I’m missing? Thanks!
Regards,
Scott
@Scott, do you have your full gmail address in the Settings? For example, if your gmail username is scott, do you have scott@gmail.com set as your google login?
Thanks Mike- Indeed I had not been using that address. I had been using the address that my gmail forwards to (and also gets me into G Reader). Sorry for the time waster.
Regards,
Scott
@Scott, no worries at all. Glad I could help.
Now that we have oldest-to-newest, the two features I’d still like to see in Feeds are:
Items friends have shared with me.
Number count of starred items (like I would for any other feed).
What else do you have planned?
@John, we have a bit more optimization to do including the feed details page. We are reorganizing the pile of buttons that made it’s way onto that page into a more usable and aesthetically pleasing configuration that will allow us to add some more features. The most popular requests so far are adding notes and posting to Twitter.
Once we get the details page wrapped up we have to do some MAJOR under the hood changes to deal with friends shared items, recommended feeds and other aggregate feeds that Google Reader offers. The feeds aren’t actual RSS feeds so they require a series of huge changes to the backend system.
Mike, I feel like I must be missing something — you say to separate email addresses with commas, but the keypad given when entering them doesn’t appear to have the comma anywhere! Is it hidden somewhere I just haven’t found yet?
@Joe, I am most certainly a fool. As you have found, the particular keyboard used for text entry doesn’t have a comma or semicolon, the two characters that allow you to send to more than one address. I will either change the character to separate the email addresses or use a different keyboard on the next update.
Great app.
I would love it even more if you made it possible for us to read the full articles through Google’s mobile-system which automatically converts (or “transcodes”) the pages to a mobile-ready format. There is one other rss-app in the AppStore which is capable of doing this, but your app is so much better.
Best regards,
André B.