Pike's Peak is waiting

We're heading out tomorrow to Colorado Springs, CO. The kids are psyched, and so am I. I don't think I've been this excited about driving 11-12 hours in a long time. I think it's going to be fun.

I've been debating on whether to drive up the mountain or just take the cog train. I have a vehicle that's capable of making the trek, but I've noticed my love of heights has diminished a LOT since I was a kid. When I was 8 years old, my dad would pay me $5 to climb to the top of a 100' elevator leg and tighten bolts or whatever. I had no problem whatsoever with it. Now, though, I don't know. I probably wouldn't do it. I don't know if sitting behind the wheel of a car would make a difference. The last time I went there, I was about 10 years old and my dad drove us up. In front of us, a VW bus had to turn around because its engine didn't have enough power at that altitude to climb to the peak. The guy turned it around in the middle of the road, and my mom almost had a heart attack when his front end was hanging over the cliff. I think I'll probably do it. It's just a mountain. Not like it's going to reach out and slap me.

In other news: I have seen the Shamwow commercials. I made a mental note to buy one if presented with a convenient opportunity, as I am the kind of guy who can't live without towels that can soak up 100x their own weight in liquids. Today I saw a 2-back of mini Shamwows and bought them. My take: Save your $6. They're about like paper towels, honestly. I don't know if the "Sham" in the name is supposed to evoke "Chamois" or "Sham", but I'm betting it's the latter. As for the "wow" part, not so much. Maybe they should have called it "Sham... Meh."

Greed: Big News

In my last post, I mentioned the big marketing push going on here at Fognl, and the goal of using pictures to increase the impact of a given post. The idea is to use pictures to reinforce the message. In the last Greed update, there were several noteworthy, but somewhat small, updates. A picture of several kittens lined up in a row seemed like an appropriate way to really drive the message home. (Also, a picture of kittens was pretty easy to find.)

This time, there's only one noteworthy item, and it's bigger. Thus, the following:



The big news is a widget. Greed now has its own widget, in case you want one.

To create a new Greed widget, just do what you normally do to create one, and you'll see a Greed item on the Widgets menu.



Select that item then select either the feed, label, or state you want to see in the widget from the feed selector screen.



Then, um... There's the widget.



The widget updates once per hour, and shows the most recent headline in the chosen feed. You can create as many Greed widgets as you want, with a separate feed in each one. When you touch a widget, it loads the article list for the feed it's watching so you can read all the items.

For now, there's only one widget size. I'm thinking of creating a "tiny" widget as well, which may just show unread counts or something. This wide one seems to take up a fair amount of space.

Well, that's all for now, enjoy the widget...

Greed: A few notable improvements

I just put out an update to Greed with a few notable features. As part of a new high-powered marketing plan here at Fognl, I'm going to include pictures in my posts to give them more visual impact. Brace yourselves.



I'm not sure which feature is the most noteworthy, so I'll list them in order of how recently I worked on them.

Customizable Menus

As of this release, you can customize the main Greed menu. If you have certain feeds you always go to first, or other things on the main menu that you never use, you can now change the menu to suit your way of using Greed. Not only that, you can create any number of custom menus and switch between them with just a couple of clicks. Here's an example:



The "Folders" item is the same "Folders" item you know and love from the standard Greed menu. The "Podcasts" item is a Google Reader label, and the remaining 3 items are regular old feed items. Clicking one of them takes you directly to the article list in that feed.

Editing a menu is pretty simple. Just click the "Menu" button from the main screen's options menu, and follow the prompts. Use the options menu to create new menus and menu items, and long-press to manage items that are already there. Here's a picture of the menu editor:



Picking a feed, label, or state item is straightforward. Just click the "Add item" option and pick the feed, label, or state item from this screen:



To use a given menu, just long-press it in the menu list and select "Use this menu". To go back to the default main menu, just click the cleverly-named "Default menu" option in the menu list screen.

I've been experimenting with exposing Greed's functionality as objects that can be used via a JavaScript interface in HTML inside the WebView component. My initial idea for a customizable UI was to make it where you could supply your own HTML-based view, for example on the SD card, and set an option for Greed to use that. I tried out the idea, and it worked well enough. The problem was avoiding making it too fiddly to use. That's how I arrived at the idea to just make the main menu customizable. I'd be interested in knowing peoples' thoughts on whether the
HTML idea seems like it's worth pursuing. Personally, I think it's kind of cool.

YouTube Videos

This update also adds YouTube video support. If you have a Podcast with an attached YouTube video, you should be able to navigate to the link in the "Attachments" dialog box and select it to view it in the YouTube player.

Note that you can't download a YouTube video to your SD card the same way you can download an audio file. Who knows? It might be useful to have the ability to convert and download videos. I don't know if that violates some kind of licensing agreement or something, but if it's legal, I think it would be useful.

Podcast Support
A recent comment about Greed reads as follows:

Good RSS reader, lamentable podcast support.

Maybe it was the fact that the commenter was articulate enough to make good use of the word "lamentable", but something about his/her comment inspired me to improve Greed's Podcast support.

The main improvement here is that now when you download a Podcast, it shows up in the Music application.



The audio file is downloaded to /sdcard/Music/Podcasts/Greed, and the Media Scanner is used to scan the file for any ID information it might have. Thus, in most cases it shows up in the music application with a proper title, "artist" information, and even an album cover. The best part is that when you play the Podcast from there, the Music player acts like it should: You get a call, it pauses. Hang up the call, it resumes. Is it just me, or is this a lot less lamentable than the old approach?

There is also an option you can set to have Greed manage the Podcast files. When it's set, you can clear downloads from within Greed, and the Media database is updated properly. When the option is turned off, you can manage the Podcast files yourself in the Music application.

Compressed Pages
There's also a new option for caching compressed (mobile) versions of pages. When you select it, Greed downloads a reduced-content version of a given page instead of the full version. (Thanks to Stephane for the suggestion.)

That's about it for the new features. The one remaining update has to do with Feed Notifications. The last update included a definitive fix for new feed notification. The method it uses for detecting new feeds is much more reliable than the previous method was. However, a few people notified me that the Updated Feeds screen was no longer acting right. I discovered a problem there with the way it was updating the unread counts, and fixed that. That should be working correctly now.

As always, suggestions are appreciated.

Greed: A few incremental updates

I think I've mentioned about 3 times already that my next planned activity WRT Greed is to write a widget for it. Soon after that, I find something else either more pressing or more interesting to work on, so I do that instead.

Folders View
This time, it was the folders view. I had always intended to eventually make the folders list into an actual hierarchical view of folders with feeds nested in them, and I got around to doing that. As a result, I think the folders view is a lot more useful than it was before.

Along the way to putting that in place, I discovered a number of things I could do to make the feeds and folders load faster, so I put that in place too. The UI in those areas should be a lot snappier now, with the feed and folder lists loading instantly.

I also realized that although my HTTP client code was checking for a "Content-Encoding" header with a value of "gzip", I wasn't actually taking advantage of it. I am now, so network performance should be faster.

Feed Notifications
Several people had mentioned that they weren't getting notified on new feeds properly, and I found a defect in that area of Greed which I fixed. You should be notified reliably whenever one of your feeds has a new item.

Android 1.5 updates
I noticed that the fonts on the Android 1.5 update where really big, making Greed look like some kind of cartoon app. I adjusted the sizes of the fonts down in some of Greed's UI elements to compensate. There are other 1.5-specific updates to take advantage of some new WebKit features (more on this to come).

Other than that, a small list of updates and bug fixes.

Next up: NOT a widget. I'll get to that eventually, but I've got an experiment I want to try. I think people will be more interested in the experiment than a widget anyway.

Artists

On occasion, I've had opportunity to talk to people who are really into what they do. Musicians, programmers, people who paint, people who roast their own coffee beans, recording engineers, etc. The ones who really stand out and are really good at something usually react a certain way when you bring up their topic of interest. They practically light up. A lot of the time, they'll immediately launch into a conversation about it, talking about the finer points of what they do. It's pretty easy to tell that they spend a lot of time thinking about it, and really like talking about it to someone. What they have to say is usually pretty informative, and it's also cool to see someone so enthused and excited about what they're doing.

Today, I had a conversation like that with the security guard who sits at the entrance to the building where I work. I've walked past this guy at least 200 times sitting at his desk. He's a pretty quiet guy. I figured if he daydreamed about anything, it was probably bass boats or Megan Fox or something (not that there's anything wrong with any of that). Anyway, he was drawing a picture of a raygun similar to the one in the picture above. I said "Hey, cool gun", and he reacted like I described above. He pulled out a small notebook full of pictures he'd been drawing and started showing them to me. There was a Robinson Crusoe beach scene in full color. Another picture showed a crew on the bridge of a huge spaceship looking out the window at another (burning) spaceship in orbit around a planet. There was a post-it note with a pencil drawing of a guy's face on it, some variations on the picture above, and a lot more. Just one amazing picture after another. I took a few pictures of his pictures with my phone (hence the blurry quality) and brought them home.

He said he drew the one above while he was talking on the phone. That probably sounds like bragging, but some of the pictures in his book had phone numbers and other notes scibbled on them, like they were phone-doodles he decided to keep. I do know that I watched him demonstrate how to draw a convincing-looking eye, and it took him all of 40 seconds to do it. From what I saw, a guy with his apparent level of talent could crank out a space-guy picture like the one above in 10 minutes while on the phone.

He said he does some work for hire too. He does portraits, and he's working on artwork for a sci-fi comic right now. If you're looking for someone who can draw really well, I know someone...

I think it's pretty interesting, finding people and things like this in unexpected places.

Greed update: Scaled Images

I just put out another Greed update. Since I just flashed my phone with the Cupcake update, this is probably the last version of Greed to not require Cupcake. (Of course, I think I said that about 2 updates ago.)

Some new features:

Compressed pages: Well, not actually "compressed"... Essentally, there's a new option in the article viewer (and on the context menu in the article list) you can use to view a "mobile" version of a given page. This uses Google's site compressor to strip the fluff out of web pages so they load faster on a mobile device.

"Cache All" improvements: Up till now, the "Cache all" action executed from the main menu could not be canceled. That is fixed now, and a progress dialog displays while the caching operation takes place. Canceling the progress dialog cancels the caching operation. "Cache All" is still a work in progress.

Image Scaling: The article viewer now (optionally) scales images so you don't have to scroll the viewer to see all them. You can long-press a link or an image in the article viewer to toggle these settings.

Follow Links: The last update included a change to keep the article viewer from opening links you accidentally click on while scrolling through the article. This feature has been added to the context menu in the article viewer. If you want to follow a specific link in the article viewer, you can long-press it, select "Follow Links", then the link will open in the browser when you click on it. Note that this doesn't change the setting, just the behavior for the article you're viewing.

Improved German Translation: Many thanks to Sascha, who translated the resources to German.

That's about it for this update. I'm going to start working on a widget now, so Greed can be Cupcake-compliant.

Greed: More incremental stuff

Another Sunday, another group of Greed updates. I had plans to change a couple of other things, like YouTube link support and a Widget in preparation for Cupcake, but there were a couple of annoyances I wanted to take care of first.

The first one was the issue of performance. Greed sometimes seems kind of sluggish, especially when navigating through a list of large articles. The reason for this is that up until this update, Greed has been loading up all of the articles in the article list, along with their content. As you scroll down through the list, more and more articles get loaded into memory. If the articles are long, that takes a lot of memory, which makes the whole device slow down. So what I do now is separate the content from the articles as they're downloaded, and only load the content when it's needed. I think it makes it a lot snappier. I'd be interested to know if you see the same results. A side benefit is that Greed should now be more stable and less apt to die for lack of memory.

By the way, you might want to clear your cache if you notice Greed acting weird.

The second issue was the "read/unread items" radio buttons at the top of the feeds and folders lists, and the article list. These were taking up screen space, so I did the "animated panel" trick with them. They display for a few seconds when the screen is first displayed, then they fade out of view. To get them back, just touch the area where you expect to see them, and they'll reappear.

One last thing that I put up earlier this week, but didn't bother posting about: Greed's annoying tendency to follow every link in the article viewer. Man, I hated that. In an article with a lot of links in it, navigating through an article was like walking through a small (and admittedly totally non-lethal) minefield. I had developed a habit of always looking for a "safe" place to touch the screen. Then I remembered it was possible to suppress that behaviour in the WebView component, so I did that. Duh. If you prefer to have this "feature" enabled, you can do so in the preferences screen with the "Follow Links" option. I worked on the idea of putting a context-menu handler in the view to turn this feature on and off on the fly, but didn't like the way that turned out. It's on my list...

That's about it for this week's updates. Stay tuned for YouTube link support and a Widget!

Also, thanks to everyone sending feedback on Greed. The criticism is always constructive, and the compliments have been appreciated too.

Finally: My apologies to the German user community for the translations. I built a GWT application for translating Android resources to different languages, and tested it on Greed. I've been notified by a couple of users that the translations leave a little bit to be desired. I believe the exact words were "Simply Horrible", which I assume is German for "sub-optimal." In any case, one of them kindly offered to translate them for me. On that subject, if any of you reading this know of other languages you'd like to see Greed translated to, there's a free copy of Greed and a big strings.xml file in it for you. :-)