Sunday, December 20, 2009

Please test NewsRob 3.4

NewsRob 3.4 is coming out soon and I would like you to test it.

Among other things it adds a sync option: "Keep and Sync Unread Articles Only", which only fetches unread articles from Google Reader. It also deletes read articles on your phone during the next sync to make room for older unread articles in your Google Reader account.

A couple of people have already been testing it, but I would like to get some more test exposure for this feature.

So please have a look at this discussion, download the beta linked there and feed back into the discussion if it works for you or if something is broken.

There are also other new features in this release. You can find details in the discussion from above.

22 comments:

  1. Thanks... been waiting for this, to move back to newsrob.
    time for sometesting

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  2. Hi,
    Just updated to the latest NewsRob (a fantastic app, i use it every day), and found that the new version isn't working for me.

    I get a "Sorry!..." message, and have to hit "force close" to end the process, when i try to start it.

    I'm using motoblur on a motorola dext (which is android 1.5 underneath). Is this the problem? Should i revert to the older version?

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  3. All's well - uninstall then reinstall, and version 3.4 works perfectly!

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  4. When you get the error message isn't it as a mail?

    Can you send the mail please? I need the information that is in the bug report.

    Android is sometimes unreliable when upgrading, you could try to reboot and see what happens.

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  5. Same trouble after upgrading, on a HTC hero - Android 1.5

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  6. Caba could you please do what I wrote in the comment before?

    Also hitting the mailing list with your reply will give you more eyeballs.

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  7. Hi Mariano,

    I am a long time fan of NewsRob and always get excited when I see a new update. I would just like to tell you what a great job you are doing and the new speed enhancements are amazing! Keep up the great work!

    I did run into one issue lately that I wanted to tell you about. I recently had to do a reset on my phone and it was at the same time that 3.4 was released. When I refreshed the data I got duplicates of every article. I cannot narrow down the cause because I also made some changes to my Google Reader (order of the tags and added a couple of bundles) but even after I changed everything back in my Google Reader account I was still getting the duplicate records. Do you know what may be causing this?

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  8. I fixed it... It didn't like the bundles or the way that I had manually sorted my feeds in Google Reader.

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  9. i'm new to newsrob as of 3.4, and i'm liking it a lot so far. thanks!

    one request: earlier posts here implied that newsrob can fetch and display shared items (and maybe notes too?), but i haven't seen that yet. it only shows me my subscriptions. am i missing something, or are shared items just not supported yet?

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  10. on second thought, scratch that. newsrob 3.4 does support shared items. i think the problem is that i'm trying to see my own shared items, which google reader itself doesn't support.

    (i'm only trying to do that as a workaround since newsrob doesn't support "notes" yet. i guess i'll just wait for that to be implemented. :P)

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  11. Hey Bryan,

    I am glad it's working for you now.

    I have heard this before though: http://groups.google.com/group/newsrob/browse_thread/thread/d6af95b1502e74c0

    It would be great to have a solution to that. Is there anything more specific you can add on how you solved this?

    Cheers,
    Mariano

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  12. Snarfed,

    I can't match up your name to the suggested feature. Did you vote for it? If not, please do, I prefer to implement things from the top of the list of feature suggestions.

    Yes, currently I don't also sync your shared articles, but maybe I'll do that in the future. I will implement share with note without the ability to unshare an annotated note.

    Maybe I will sync the articles later on. Besides it being taking a little bit of time to implement it also costs bandwidth, implementation complexity and performance.

    Cheers,
    Mariano

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  13. hi mariano! i'm Ryan B on uservoice, and i posted the Notes feature request. i'll follow up there.

    (blogger's openid support *should* use the nickname suplied in the sreg extension, which in my case is ryan, but it now evidently shows the site's domain name instead. that's sad, since i included sreg when i originally implemented it in blogger, but i haven't followed it since then. oh well.)

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  14. Hi Mariano,

    Great app but the only thing i'm missing is homescreen widget.

    Are there any plans to implement this in the future?

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  15. Ryan, yes definitively that would be great.

    Randy, yes, absolutely:
    http://newsrob.uservoice.com/pages/35624-general/suggestions/409292-simple-widget-with-unread-count?ref=title
    http://newsrob.uservoice.com/pages/35624-general/suggestions/416463-add-widget-support-showing-latest-headlines?ref=title

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  16. I'm having some trouble with 3.4.0, wherein Google Reader shows I have several hundred unread items, while NewsRob downloads only a few dozen. Capacity is set to 1000, storage provider is SD, and there are hundreds of megabytes free on the SD card. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it, but I get the same behavior.

    If I do an explicit refresh, it finds only a couple of new articles, and seems to complete successfully (e.g. 3/3), but then I get a popup with:

    Synchronize Model failed: java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: null

    which displays for a couple of seconds.

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  17. mdzlog, sorry to hear that. Could you please install "Log Collector" from the Android Market (the free version is good enough) and send me a logfile after you see the error message?

    Regarding the other issue:

    Not all of the feeds in Google Reader show up on NewsRob. Why's that?

    NewsRob will only show the feeds for which there are currently articles on your phone.
    If you have 300 feeds on Google Reader, but the most recent 500 articles, if that is what you set capacity-setting to, only are in 90 feeds, then you will only see 90 feeds. When new articles arrive that are in other feeds, those feeds will be displayed then.
    Also NewsRob will only show the feeds that match the current selection. That means if you look at the label "android" it will only show you the feeds that are below the "android" label, also if you set NewsRob to "hide read articles" you will only see feeds with unread articles.

    The new sync option, marked as experimental, would help here, but is broken. Hopefully working ok in the next version.

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  18. Thanks for your response. I'll send you the logs separately.

    Regarding which articles are shown, I think you may have misunderstood me. I have been using NewsRob for some months now successfully, and understand which articles are shown and when. I have unread articles which are inexplicably not being downloaded at all, which I never saw prior to 3.4.0. I even tried clearing the cache and reinstalling NewsRob, but it only downloads about 20 of the 300+ unread articles.

    Perhaps it's related to the exception?

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  19. I have a question about the security model that NewsRob uses.

    When I log in, are my credentials included in a request directly to the Google servers? Or are they sent to a NewsRob server which then proxies the request to Google?

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  20. Crevicelint, they are posted to Google only and SSL is used to encrypt the transport.

    There is no NewsRob server.

    Please also read what I just posted: http://newsrob.blogspot.com/2010/02/authentication.html

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  21. Mariano,

    Thanks for the quick response!

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