Friday, June 11, 2010

NewsRob June Release / 4.0

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This is the release focussed on enhancing existing functionality, fixing bugs and improving performance, so a Snow NewsRob release ;) I also laid down groundwork for features of upcoming releases. The changes are roughly sorted by their importance. Hence feel free to skip the remainder at any time you find yourself bored ;)

While we're at it. What is most important to you? Let me know on the sidebar poll.


NewsRob June Release

Fit-To-Width can now be disabled

The fit-to-width option introduced in the last release can now be disabled on a per-feed-basis. Many people showed their support for this on user voice and I should've included that in the original release.





Toggle Theme (Pro)

Changing themes does not make it necessary anymore to reopen the previously opened screens or more accurately NewsRob now does this for you.
Also you can now use a menu action to toggle between those two themes.





Full Screen (Pro)

In the article detail view you can double tap the content area (the article's body) and toggle in and out of a full screen mode.



Global download option "Articles + Images + Full Web Page" gone

The mentioned option is gone as a global default, because it never really made sense except for consistency. This extra effort in bandwidth and battery is only worth it if you have partial feeds. For the majority of feeds it doesn't make sense, but if unsuspectingly configured it will lead to more battery and bandwidth consumption than necessary.
Of course, on a per-feed-basis you can still use that option.


Stable sorting

In previous versions marking an article read/unread may have resulted in the article "jumping" in the current list. This was sometimes the case for articles that were published at the same time. This is now fixed.


List Refresh

In a dump attempt to improve performance previous versions of NewsRob sometimes delayed the refreshing of the article list. Because of this it was possible that you tapped on an article, but instead of opening this article, NewsRob would open one of the new articles that were just downloaded just this moment. From this version on this should not happen anymore under normal circumstances.

User Voice: Keep UI synced.


Upsync not working

A bug is now fixed that sometimes lead to the upsync (uploading your changes) failing when the app was open longer than 30 minutes.


Relogin

In the previous version NewsRob was doing an automatic relogin (when configured), but unfortunately still showed the notification that a relogin was needed. This healed itself during the next sync.
This is fixed now.


Returning to Article Detail View

When returning to the Article Detail View from a phone call or something similar then you were not able to move to the previous articles. I found a way to enable this for more cases than before.
User Voice: Previous Bug.


Airplane Mode now observed explicitly

When in Airplane mode NewsRob will not sync or download anymore, even if you manually request it and NewsRob will tell you so.
However this is more of a hygienic issue. NewsRob also wasn't able to download/sync/run down your battery before. But now it's handled more explicitly.


Downloading of articles with global default "Articles"

When setting the global download default to "Articles" NewsRob was still downloading "Articles + Images". This is fixed now.


Known Issues - Froyo

YouTube video thumbnails are no longer displayed. I currently don't know why that is.
Let's wait for Froyo to officially come out and I'll have another look.
Also the current beta of Flash doesn't seem to be stable. I'll keep an eye on that too. If you have any specific knowledge on those issues, let me know.


Action Bar

Google announced on the 12th of May that they will open source the twitter app. I am waiting for this to happen and will work on the action bar.


Info Message (Pro)

When you select the installed Pro app in the Android Market app the "open" button will now show a message explaining that you're done and can use the free version with the unlocked pro features.


Preferences

Values in list preferences are now shown in the overview.