Keep And Sync: Unread Articles Only

Update: This sync option is working now and not considered experimental anymore.

With NewsRob 3.4.0 a new sync option was introduced:

Keep And Sync: Unread Articles Only (Experimental)

Please don't use that feature anymore. For some users it lead to articles marked as read, that weren't read. I don't know yet, what the problem is, but I'll put an update onto this post when I know more.

This conversation contains more details and I will keep it updated.

Please test NewsRob 3.4

NewsRob 3.4 is coming out soon and I would like you to test it.

Among other things it adds a sync option: "Keep and Sync Unread Articles Only", which only fetches unread articles from Google Reader. It also deletes read articles on your phone during the next sync to make room for older unread articles in your Google Reader account.

A couple of people have already been testing it, but I would like to get some more test exposure for this feature.

So please have a look at this discussion, download the beta linked there and feed back into the discussion if it works for you or if something is broken.

There are also other new features in this release. You can find details in the discussion from above.

Vote for your favorite feature at uservoice

Hi,

I am trying out uservoice. You can add feature requests there and vote on them.

Check it out. You can also access it from the "feedback" tab on the left.

We'll see how well this goes. If it works for us, we'll keep it.

Fifty Thousands Downloads

Update: As a response to user feedback from the next version on NewsRob will not collect any stats anymore for the time being.

*If* I will turn it back on I will do so in a *loud* way and will ask the users for feedback *first*.

I am very happy to announce that NewsRob now has been downloaded more than 50,000 times from the Android Market. Thank you!

I have been frequently asked about different stats on NewsRob. I think this is a good time to share some data.

NewsRob was published to the Android Market in the mid of January 2009, but I just started tracking the number of active users in May 2009. So here are the active users since then:

The ups are when a new version was published, except for the last one, that was the introduction of the Droid. The downs are the weekends.

Active users are unique users on that particular day, think visitors. Passive NewsRob installations that just sync, but the NewsRob UI was not launched, are not taken into account.

This is the geo distribution of NewsRob users:

Interestingly Spain is the single largest NewsRob user base in Europe. Muchas gracias.

The top four European countries combined are about the same population as the US alone, but that wasn't surprising ;-)

I personally find the following interesting:

The average time of a NewsRob session is 20 minutes and on average the NewsRob GUI is launched three times a day by a user.

When taking the number of users of a single day, say 8,000, multiply it by the number of sessions, say three, and by the average session length, you'll get 8,000*3*20/60/24 = 333 days of usage per calendar day.

If you continue that example you'll get to 25 years of usage for November, or 19 year for October as seen above. Pretty cool I would say. It far out weights the time I spent working on NewsRob.

Last not least here are some technical parameters you may find interesting:

Roughly every 5th NewsRob user runs cyanogenmod:

In case you are curious, this data is provided by flurry.

Bonus: Walking Down Memory Lane

Ok, you made it until here, so there is a special treat for you. Tim Suh posted a video of NewsRob nine months ago on YouTube. I think it's interesting to see that today. There are still some elements left that are in today's version of NewsRob.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT THE CURRENT VERSION OF NEWSROB.

Droid takes the world by storm?

I read a couple of times now that the Motorola Droid is selling like hot cake. On the first weekend 100,000 devices might have been sold?!

The NewsRob users may not be representative, but looking at the numbers it seems that every tenth NewsRob user is now a Droid user.

The numbers are from yesterday. Look at the percentages:

I am waiting for the Droid myself, but it will take another couple of days until it is available in Europe as Motorola Milestone.

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NewsRob 3.2.2

Update: Just rolled out 3.2.4 rolling back the new up-sync, because it produced duplicate state changes.

Deviating from my standard practice I wrote release notes for this one as there is something I'd like you to know.

NewsRob 3.2.0 and 3.2.1 use incremental syncing with the Google Reader service. Unfortunately this seems to be inaccurate/erroneous at the moment.
Therefore in NewsRob 3.2.2 it is turned off for the time being. But I try to get to the bottom of it (link).

I will push out 3.2.2 right now to prevent confusion about the effects. Having said that, it is not too bad. Some articles will be accidentally shown as read, but are not. The Google Reader web interface will still show them as unread, so that you don't miss articles completely.

I added a switch in the settings so that you can turn it on again if performance is more important to you than accuracy.

If you have any relevant experiences you'd like to share, please do so here.

The release:

- Added switch for incremental syncing, off by default (for now)
- Using SAX for parsing instead of DOM (flatter memory profile, fixes continuation problems)
- Faster sync of local changes ("Synchronizing state ...")
- Initial capacity 20 -> 50
- Cyanogen Mod Rom version is now part of the information gathered during the bug report creation

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Can't Support Cyanogen Mod ROMs Anymore - Sorry

Update: All is good for now. See in the comments, there is a bug tracker for CM that I wasn't aware of and Bugabundo offered his help.

(If NewsRob took you to this page then you just hit a bug that most likely only happens on Cyanogen Mod. If that is not the case, let me know in the comments.)

The situation

Meanwhile 90% of the bug reports I receive are from phones running some version of Cyanogen Mod (4.0.4, 4.1.11.1, 4.1.999).

The problem is that I don't know what to do with them. The bugs don't happen with a stock Android and I don't know how to contact Steve in a way that is efficient for me. I don't even have his email address. It needs to be efficient, because I have my own bug fixing and development to do so I can't go through all the messages on the XDA developer forums (but you could, if you like, see below).
I don't see what else to do, but to stop supporting CM. I would be willing to fix my code if it is the problem. I would also do some small CM-specific changes if necessary, but for that I would need to know what and without an efficient communication channel that is not possible?!

Don't get me wrong, it's great that there is CM. A short while ago I was running 4.11.1 myself to get Wifi-Tether.
I uninstalled it, because it was spontaneously rebooting. Mind you the version I used was experimental and it's understandable that it's not rock solid. The problem here is that people are using it not to weed out bugs, but for their day to day operations and expect support for it, including for the experimental version. And that would be fine with me, if there would be somebody on the other side caring for the bugs.

I also fully understand that if Steve would look at each bug report and weed out the duplicates himself, then he wouldn't have the time to develop CM.

Where to go from here?

If you want NewsRob 3.2.0, which didn't crash that often on CM I can sent you a version by email or put it up on the web someplace. It wasn't using SQL views and SQL UNIONs as hard as NewsRob 3.2.1 does and this might be the reason, why it isn't crashing on CM that often.
I would advise you not to do it this way though. You won't get updates this way and 3.2.0 has some bugs that are fixed in 3.2.1 (Mark All Read doesn't work for "my recently starred" and "friends recently shared"), but I'll leave that up to you.

If you want to downgrade to stock Donut, you'll find instructions here.

You can also, of course, stop using NewsRob ;-( I understand! Still, please don't let me know about it, that would make me sad.

This all costs me time that I cannot spend on NewsRob. So I would like to ask you to accept my decision and not start an endless discussion that will also keep me from developing NewsRob.

A proposition

If you are really interested in CM and NewsRob and you happen to be a developer, I have a proposition for you.

Until CM sets up a bug tracker or some lieutenant that weeds through bug reports, you can be that person and act as a mediator between NewsRob and CM. When NewsRob hits an error the compose email screen opens with a stack trace from NewsRob etc. Take this information and go to the XDA developers forum or on the IRC channel of CM (you need to be authenticated, however that works) and contact Steve. I believe it is your job to check through the overwhelming number of messages on XDA first to see if there is any information about this problem, and if not, post the information from the bug report there.
If you can spare the time, it would be even better if you use the Log Collector app to create a logfile which contains all the necessary information. For most cases this will be much more helpful.
If NewsRob automatically took you to this page, then the latter is your only option anyway.

This process will hopefully yield some useful information and if you get back to me with them, I am happy to help.

Update: Of course, if the CM/NR combination works for you, then there is no need for a change. It would be interesting to know what the percentage of users without problems is.

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