Saturday, February 21, 2009

NewsRob 1.4

Changes since last Sunday:

  • As requested feed content is now downloaded too.

    When downloading of web pages is enabled in the preferences the feed content is downloaded too. This shouldn't take much more bandwidth as mostly the same assets, i.e. images, are referenced from both representations and NewsRob only downloads them once.
    This should lead to an increased flip-through speed as images don't have to be downloaded anymore.

    Some time after the middle of March there will be a version of NewsRob that will let you decide on a feed-by-feed basis if you want both representations downloaded, only the feed content including the assets, only the web page including assets or nothing.

    Probably even more importantly this preference will also be used to decide which representation to use (feed content or web page) when flipping through the articles.
    This means when you swipe to the right to navigate to the next article and it's from a feed that you declared as "download webpage including all assets" then it will be opened with the downloaded web page representation, otherwise it will use the feed content.

    This way you get the fastest flip-through speed, using the feed content, and the full content when necessary, e.g. partial feeds.

  • Ads from admob are now shown.

    We'll see how well that goes. I put in some extra effort to only show the 48px high ads in the vertical orientation, so that they are unobtrusive and don't take lots of screen estate.

  • Last synced is now displayed.

    As requested the last time synced and if it was incomplete (due to an error) is now displayed in the status bar of the dashboard, but only if it is in its horizontal orientation.

  • The NewsRob icon shown in the status bar when synchronizing is gone for now.

    There is a bug that annoying the heck out of me. The sync-in-progress notification hangs around even though the synchronization is over.
    I completely disabled this notification for the time being, because my time is better spent on other stuff (features) than hunting down that particular bug.

    In my development/debug version of NewsRob that I carry around with me all week, the notification will still be there and keep me honest not to forget about it.

  • "Reading List" is now called "All Articles".

  • New pseudo label "Friends's Shared Articles".
I am very much interested in feedback, here in the comments on Twitter or in the recently created Google group.

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