Monday, October 12, 2009

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

Posted via email from newsrob's posterous

14 comments:

  1. On a different matter: If you need a german translation i'm willing to write one for you. Just give me the strings you need to see translated.

    thanks for a great app. I use it every day.

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  2. yay!
    does that mean i can come back full time to NR?
    I've been using ReaderScope more, cause it allows me to pull to offline just a few labels, without the limit of 500 last notices, many of them from stuff i wont read anyway :)

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  3. Mark'Oh! Thanks for the offer. I intend to offer translations, but I am really behind schedule here and it's not near the top of my prios ;-)
    But thanks anyway, I'll keep your offer in mind, but as I am German myself, I would probably use German as the test language and translate it myself.


    Bugabundo, unfortunately no ;-( There is currently a problem with the incremental sync.

    When this is fixed I will likely raise the limit incrementally to 1000 articles.

    Also I intend to filter out articles that are in some "magic" folder, e.g. NewsRob Ignore.

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  4. Thanks for the reply!
    Guess I'll keep it in the backburner for now.
    That feature is very important for me.

    Still I love the way your offline mode works unlike readerscope, that is still very limited, improving, but limited :(

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  5. Offtopic but...
    I'll be glad, someday, to translate your awesome software into spanish.
    Keep on working! Your app is great!

    Nwaps

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  6. Thank you for this application! It is one of the quality apps out there that make switching to Android worth it!

    The speed improvements have been awesome! Thank you for dedicating your time to this because this is the most used app on my phone.

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  7. BG, thank you.

    I appreciate your feedback very much!

    It's great to see that the under-the-hood work doesn't go by unnoticed, even though the UI doesn't change and no new features are introduced.

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  8. This app is great, but I miss a feature. I'd like newsRob use my stored gmail account to retrieve the feeds, or at least give that option, so you dont need to put your email/pass. That would be more comfortable, and secure.
    Also, it would be great posting comments to friends shared from newsRob.

    Just some ideas :)
    Thx!

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  9. Adrián,

    those things have been discussed on the list. Feel free to jump in.

    Using the Google Account is an all-time-favorite and has been last discussed here:
    link

    Share with comments: link

    Add to the conversations if you like.

    Cheers,
    Mariano

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  10. Is the same case sharing with comments than adding a comment to a friends shared item? Just curious...

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  11. I don't know. I need to investigate that and unfortunately this doesn't mean to look up stuff in a public API, but run the webapp and watch the network traffic with wire shark, then figure it out and play with the snooped API.

    Hence it's not a quick thing and as it is not at the top of my TODO list it is not imminent.
    Sorry.

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  12. Hi, I just downloaded the app very nice. THere are two blogs that are really heavy posters. One is a famous NYC blog called Gothamist, great blog, but just today Dec. 4th there were 33 posts. So that alone takes away from all the other blogs I have in the google reader. How do I limit the number of posts for each specific blog? Is that possible? If not, it would be something to consider in an update. Thank you.

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  13. Hi Shveckle,

    I totally understand where you are coming from, but right now I don't see how I should accomplish this. The GR api doesn't let me exclude some feeds ;-(

    I will bring it up with the GR engineer again at some point in time, but it's not so long ago that I asked for it the last time ;-)

    Here ist the FAQ entry:

    "I would like to exclude certain feeds/folders from the sync or set a maximum number of messages. How can I do that?"

    I understand the need. There is a couple of feeds that I rarely look at on my phone, e.g. my flickr friends' photos, and it would be good if I could skip them on the phone, but I don't know how to provide that. The GR API doesn't let me exclude specific feeds, so I am not aware of a sane or at least efficient way to do that.

    If NewsRob were a Desktop app, where efficiency is not that important, I could query Google Reader for each feed individually, but this is very inefficient and so I can't do that for NewsRob.

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