NewsRob October Release / 4.4

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Want to submit a feature suggestion? http://bit.ly/nr_suggest

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NewsRob October Release / 4.4

Rich Article List

The new version now sports a richer article list. 

If possible it contains a snippet of the article and a thumbnail of a significant image from the article. 

Snippets will be prepared during the import of new articles. So if you want to see this new feature in full action right away you should do a Clear Cache / Sync.

Obeying Global Auto-Sync Setting

When NewsRob is configured to automatically sync in the background it already obeys the global, system wide, background data setting. With this version NewsRob will also obey the global auto-sync setting.

You can now conveniently turn off all automatic syncing (Gmail, Facebook, NewsRob ...) in one place.

It might be confusing that now syncing can be turned off in more than one place. To prevent this confusion NewsRob will now warn you when auto-sync has been disabled globally, but is enabled in NewsRob.

For the programmers amongst you: When turning the global auto-sync setting back on I would like NewsRob to check if the last sync is longer ago then the configured interval. If that is the case it should run a sync right away.

However I don't know how to get notified when the auto-sync status changes and so I can't implement it at the moment. If you do know, please leave a comment or come to the list: http://bit.ly/nr_list. 

As always, many more small improvements and fixes are in this release. Here are two of those, that may affect you directly or where many people wrote me about:

Accidental Swipes

To prevent accidental swipes, e.g. left-to-right to mark an article read on the article list, swipes must be now more explicit. This means that the direction of the swipe must be more pronounced. To mark an article read you still must swipe from left-to-right (at least 45° to less than 135°), but also the horizontal movement of your finger must be significantly longer than the vertical movement.

Twitter URLs

Twitter changed their URL scheme and it broke some of the links in feeds when shown in NewsRob. This should work correctly again now.

NewsRob September Release / 4.3

Want to report a bug? Discuss a feature? Need help? Please come to the mailing list: http://bit.ly/nr_list

Want to submit a feature suggestion? http://bit.ly/nr_suggest

Looking for the FAQ: http://bit.ly/nrfaq


NewsRob September Release / 4.3

I am back from my vacation and enjoyed it very much. Thanks for your patience.

Selective Syncing / Sync "newsrob" only (Pro)

This is the implementation of the current #1 feature request: Sync Only Certain Folders

Unfortunately there is no efficient way to exclude selected feeds from the sync. However from this version on you can now tell NewsRob to only sync feeds that are below the a tag/folder called "newsrob".
As a side note you can add feeds to more than one folder/tag at the same time.

Although this feature should be easy enough to use, it was quite complex to implement it properly. So for this release you find the setting to enable this feature under the "experimental" section in the settings. If you run into any trouble please let me know on the list.

There are two possible extensions to this functionality and you can submit feature requests on uservoice for them. If you create those feature suggestions you can also announce them on the existing feature request from above, so that you meet an audience of likeminded people quickly.

It might be interesting to configure the name of the "newsrob" tag. That way you can sync multiple devices with different sets of feeds, e.g. "newsrob-droid" and "newsrob-tab".

Also "newsrob" only syncing does just that (plus starred, shared, notes in the pro version). Maybe I should add "friends's shared articles" as another category?

Furthermore a few major bugs are fixed now and a lot of minor ones. Among the major bugs were issues with "Unsubscribe Feed" and "Mark Read Until Here".