Wednesday, May 20, 2009

NewsRob 2.2

What's new and changed in this release?

Articles Are Now Browsable By Feed

If you have comments about this new feature, please add to this discussion.

Bugfix: Sync

Fixed a bug that caused NewsRob to sync more often than expected. 

Mark All Read Now Possible During A Running Sync

Many of you have asked for that.

Flurry Integration

Testing the use of flurry (http://flurry.com) to track data like NewsRob and OS versions, session durations, usage frequency of "Mark All Read", etc.

It came as a surprise to me that so many of you complained about "Mark All Read" not being possible during a running synchronization. I considered "Mark All Read" not being important at all, but it seems many of you are using it. Hopefully flurry will over time give me some more insights about things that don't fit my expectations. 

BugFix: Fast Sync

After each change (unread -> read, unshared -> shared, etc.) a countdown runs down from 5 minutes to 0. When reaching 0 only the local changes are upload to Google Reader. When you change another article during this 5 minutes the countdown restarts. 

The idea behind this is that NewsRob should do a sync with Google Reader during the time you need from the train/tube/metro/underground/bus to your desk. So that when you access Google Reader from your desk the articles you just read on the train are not showing up anymore.

The fast sync will be signaled with "Uploading Changes" in the status bar.

This was already implemented, but at least in the last release it was doing too much and taking too long. With this release it is actually working as intended: fast.

Sync Notification Is Back

As longtime NewsRob users will likely remember there used to be a notification in the status bar when NewsRob is running. At that time sometimes the notification would hang around even though the sync was finished. As a result I removed it.

I think I now got it right and re-added it. Let me know if there is still a problem.

The idea behind the notification is to show that NewsRob is doing something in the background with your phone. It shouldn't slow it down in theory, because those background activities run with a very low priority, but in reality it is just a phone and so you will be impacted a little bit.

It's a NewsRob-Anti-Marketing feature ;-)


NewsRob Testing

Once again, many thanks to Matthias for testing this release. We were off with a very rocky start this time ;-)

Thank you, Matt!


Bug Fixes

Like with the the other releases, bugs that are reported now will be fixed right away and new versions might come out rapidly over the next hours, maybe one or two days. After that I will only bring out a new release when I encounter a serious bug.

So if you don't like frequent updates, wait for a short while.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from newsrob's posterous


Update 2.2.1:

  • Some images weren't downloaded and the article was marked with a red dot, most notably this sometimes happened with engadget and gizmodo.
  • Removed sync notification again. In some cases it still seems to hang around, even though the sync is finished.
    Also some users seem to be a strongly and loudly against this feature. So if I will fix it, it will come back as an option only. 

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