NewsRob 1.7 - A Star Is Back!

That was a busy week. Changes from last week:

• Starring icon is back
  
  Due to popular and partially loud demand the star is back, at least on the Show Article screen. I got four people writing me that they really need that feature.
  
  It is now located to the right of the article's header and works the same way as before. The feed title's text can now flow through it though, so that it's very space efficient, but in far less than 10% of the cases the feed's title might partially collide with the star icon. This is only a little cosmetic issue though.
  
  
  
• New navigation
  
  After having a lengthy conversation with Shemp DeYoung about the current navigation and other NewsRob issues I concur that users don't want to read documentation or watch videos. They want intuitive to use features.
  
  So I followed his advise and had a second look at the navigation of Google's pictures manager that is part of the Camera app.
  
  And meanwhile I found a solution to my bigest gripe I had with it when I saw the navigation for the first time:
  In the pictures app you need to touch the screen once to get the on-screen-controls to show up and then another time to actually select them.
  
  The new navigation is based on the pictures-navigation, but if you tap on the part of the screen where the navigation will show up (it the same spots all the time) it already executes the tap on the on-screen-controls, so that you can navigate to the next article with one tap, instead of two.
  
  That sounds more complicated than it is. Try it for yourself.
  
  
  
• Zoom Controls
  
  On the heels of the new navigation came the zoom controls.
  You can now use the same controls for zooming that you already know from the Android browser.
  
  
  
• Larger touch areas
  
  The new icons (globe etc.) introduced in last week's release are smaller than the ones I used before and as a result they take up less space, leaving more room for actual information. That is a good thing, but as they also should be touchable the smaller size came at a price.
  
  I therefore enlarged the touch areas of the globe/phone and the star by 100%. So if you click a little to the right of the globe or a little to the left of the star on the right, you should still be ok and launch the action you intended.
  
  
  
• Performance Improvements
  
  Marcus Schmidke gave me detailed feedback and suggestions regarding NewsRob's performance. As a result of this motivation it is roughly 50% faster now to open the first article after starting NewsRob. As you may remember opening the first article took very long and now only takes half very long ;-) There is still work to do left.
  
  Following another suggestion of Marcus the article row on the Article List screen now changes its background color to a shade of yellow to indicate that it recognized the touch, but it still takes a moment to actually change onto the Show Article screen.
  
  Also the background activities shouldn't be slowing down the phone as noticeable as before. Of course, it still makes a difference if NewsRob is currently performing a synchronization, but at this point I am not sure if I can implement this totally unobtrusively and please keep in mind that this is a mobile phone and not a multi-core desktop machine ;-)
  
  Let me know what you think about the current performance and which areas hurt you the most. When the current performance is good enough for you, I would also like to hear about it.
  
  Keeping me on the toes in terms of performance is ok, but it diverts my attention from other functionality to implement. So think about what you want most ;-)
  
  
  
• Signing in with Google Apps For Your Domain
  
  Brint Kriebel reported that he couldn't use his GAFYD account with NewsRob.
  I checked with other apps and it wasn't possible there too. Fortunately Brint hooked me up with a test account for GAFYD and I was able to get it working.
  
  The implementation changes I had to do were a bit strange though. I actually implemented something the other way round as suggested by the documentation, but as it works and the whole API is somewhat unofficial I'll leave the solution in.
  
  I mentioned this so explicitly, because I want you to be aware of this issue if you suddenly can't login anymore. Let me know right away then and I will back out the change.
  
  I tested all known cases to me though and am somewhat confident that it is ok.
  
  
  
• Q-Reports
  
  You probably noticed Q-Gate this week. As a result now automatic bug reports are collected by NewsRob when it crashes.
  
  It contains a stacktrace and version information. It is all pasted into a new mail and you can add what you did yourself and then send it.
  
  It would be great if you would send me all the bugs that occur. Even if it's something I can't fix (because it is a WebView problem for example) or you know that I know about it.
  The Q-Reports will give me qualitative information as provided in the mail and quantitative information as provided by the number of mails.
  
  I first thought about submitting the information automatically under the hood and directly to my server, but as this may look like a privacy invasion I then changed the idea and now use an semi-automatic approach using mail.
  

I will likely (no promise though) start something new this week. I will post a video of the new/changed features later on this week to illustrate them.


Feature-wise we are nearing completion of the initial need. Working on performance and optimization often means lots of research and trying out different implementations, only to through away all of them, but the one that works. So there is lots of work without much to show for.
Therefore, and because my personal life is too much on the backburner right now, I will go from a weekly release schedule to bi-weekly.