Monday, January 31, 2011

NewsRob January Release / 4.7

NewsRob January Release / 4.7 

Want to report a bug? Discuss a feature? Need help? Please come to the mailing list: http://bit.ly/nr_list
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NewsRob January Release / 4.7


NewsRob Turns Two -– Special Promotion


NewsRob was initially published roughly two years ago and now enters its third year of life ;) It has been a great time and I'd like to use this occasion to offer NewsRob for €1.99 (€2.37 incl. Tax in the EU) until the end of February.

If you just very recently purchased NewsRob for the full price and feel cheated now, please contact me: mariano.kamp@gmail.com.


Subscribe to Feed in Google Reader

You now subscribe to feeds in Google Reader from within NewsRob.
Either you select it from any article lists' option menu or you send a link to NewsRob from another app or NewsRob itself.

The subscription dialog shows you a list of possible feeds for your keywords and works interactively. The actual fetching of new articles happens in the background during the next sync.

This is the implementation for the #3 feature suggestion at uservoice.


Google Ads - Full Screen Available in Free Version

Unfortunately AdMob dropped the support for narrow ads in their current SDK. As this was the only reason to still use AdMob, those ads are now replaced by Google Ads. NewsRob was showing Google Ads already on the bottom of the lists, but will now also do that on the article detail view.

Those are a bit taller than the narrow AdMob ads. To sweeten the deal the full screen mode of NewsRob is now available in the free version too and in full screen mode you should now have more space than you had before.

You can toggle the full screen mode with a double tap on the content area.


End of Support for Android 1.5 - 2.0.1 Devices

Meanwhile there aren't that many Android devices accessing NewsRob anymore that run an Android Version below Android 2.1. See the graphic on the right for a distribution of Android versions for NewsRob Pro.
As a consequence I am now dropping the official support for versions below Android 2.1.

This is the last version of NewsRob that is available for older Android versions and will be frozen. Hopefully that strikes a good balance between moving forward and not leaving the users of old versions totally behind.

At the beginning of March you will see the following message if you use an old Android version:


NewsRob kept compatibility with old Android versions for quite some time and to some extent will continue to do so. 
However this comes at a cost and as meanwhile there are only a few users left who use NewsRob on Android 1.5 - 2.0.1 devices, this cost became harder and harder to justify over the last releases.
To pick up speed with development the support for the older Android versions will be dropped from the main version of NewsRob. 
However to make sure that you are still able to install NewsRob and get an update when I discover a very critical bug, a new version of NewsRob is on the Android Market for devices running older versions of the AndroidOS. 
Please install the new version using the button below. You then need to uninstall the current version of NewsRob. 
If you have the Pro version of NewsRob this will also be recognized by the new version. 
Also your per-feed settings will be picked up by the new version, but you need to login again and configure the basic parameters. 
Thanks! – Waiting for you on the other side. 


New Authentication

It seems that the new authentication – introduced in the previous release – works well for the vast majority of NewsRob users.

However as there were a few disgruntled one-star-comments on the Android Market I'd like to say again that this only works for proper Google accounts. These are all accounts that end with gmail.com or googlemail.com as well as the Google Apps For Your Domain accounts that Google already migrated.
If you don't have one of those, please continue to use the classic method.

Well, if you didn't read the previous release notes explaining that, you probably aren't reading these either and I am preaching to the choir ;) Anyway, there is also now a hint text on the account list / login dialog.


Misc

A lot of small performance/responsiveness improvements went into this release. Please come to the mailing list if you still see a black screen or an Application Not Responding dialog.

Another small enhancement should be valuable for web comics. When "Image Fit-To-Width" is enabled the resizing will be done again when changing the orientation of your device, at least until you first scroll into the article.