NewsRob 2.0

NewsRob 2.0 is just another release. Nothing earth shattering, completely backward compatible. 

It's the 10th major release and could have been NewsRob 1.10 if Android's versioning scheme would have supported that.

I would like to thank Matthias for helping out again. He beta tested the new release!

Locale integration is included and described here. Also the fix – recently mentioned here – made it into the release. Especially the latter was quite some work and I really hope that I didn't break things. Let me know if you experience otherwise.

Cupcake

NewsRob checks for a new version once a day when the UI is opened. As part of that request it transmits the current NewsRob version and the installed SDK (more about that in another post). I need this information to decide what versions I still need to support.

An interesting, or at least unexpected, insight I gathered was that 12% of the NewsRob users already use Cupcake.

I don't want to risk running Cupcake on my G1. I fear that I somehow will not be able to get back to the supported version, which is what most of you use. But I run Cupcake in the emulator and meanwhile fixed all issue I found so far.

Except one, when changing preferences on the settings screen, some of them change the schedule of synchronizations. With cupcake that sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't. If it works you will see a toast-message saying that a new schedule is in place. If you don't see a message it didn't work and the new schedule will only be activated after the next reboot. This is relevant for the "Auto-Sync" setting and the "Synchronization Interval".

I support Cupcake, as good as I can. So if you run into a bug, don't hesitate to report it.

I don't plan to release Cupcake-only functionality in the next two months though. I think that widgets or live folders would be a nice way to display the latest articles, but I will wait until Cupcake is rolled out widely before doing that.

Resume Show Article Now Has A Memory

As reported by Michelle NewsRob forgot the zoom settings and which part of an article was shown in the Show Article screen. When for example a SMS arrived a new dialogue from SMS popup would appear on top of the Show Article screen. After dealing with the SMS and the dismissal of the popup the NewsRob screen would be shown again, but the zoom settings were gone and the document was shown at the beginning again.

In this scenario NewsRob will now return into the same state it was left before the SMS dialog popped up.

Hiding Downloaded Assets

Images that are downloaded by NewsRob or other apps and stored to the SD care are picked up by Android's Camera/Pictures application, which can be a bit confusing. It would be nice it the pictures application could be tweaked to hide certain folders, but a bug report/enhancement request going into this direction has not even been acknowledged by Google. 

As that doesn't make me confident that Google will do something about it in the foreseeable future NewsRob now masks all file extensions of downloaded assets so that images are now longer found by the media scanner that the Pictures app uses. 

It will only do that for the articles that are downloaded from now on forward. Hence it will take a bit of time until the "newsrob" album completely disappears from the Pictures app.

I also changed the way that the downloaded articles are organized. This should speed some use cases up quite a bit, but will also only take effect slowly.

Posted via email from newsrob's posterous