fognl

Get off my lawn.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Android: Greed update #1

I just put a Greed update up on Android Market. It contains a few new features, and fixes:

Read vs. unread items: Previously, when you selected "unread items" and there were fewer unread items in the feed than would show in the article list, the unread items would be accompanied by read items. These were coming from Google Reader that way, and Greed now filters the read items out of the list for consistency's sake.

Wrapped article titles: Some people didn't like the fact that article titles were single-line items that got truncated if their width went beyond the width of the article list, so now there's an option for allowing them to be wrapped multi-line items.

Mark Feed as Read: You can now mark all of the items in a feed as read. Long-touch a feed, and select "Mark feed as read" from the context menu.

Scrolling: When scrolling through articles in the article viewer with the soft buttons, the previous version would stop once it reached the end of the downloaded articles. This update downloads new articles as you scroll forward, allowing you to read all of a feed's items without leaving the article viewer if you want to.

Flip Orientation: The article viewer now has a "flip orientation" option, so you can read articles in "big-screen TV" mode without popping the keyboard out.

Shared Items: You can now put items in your "Shared" area, either by long-clicking in the article list, or clicking a check box in the article viewer. "Share with note" isn't supported yet, but I might do that soon.

A couple of minor performance improvements.

New layouts for some of the list item views.

That's about it for this update.

18 Comments:

  • At 11:54 PM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Excellent updates.

    One more feature implementation(alerts), and I can uninstall my other RSS readers, and finally be quite happy with my chosen reader.

    I moved my rating from 4 stars to 5 stars after this update.

    Thanks.

     
  • At 12:33 AM , Blogger Kelly said...

    Hey, thanks for the upped rating. :-)

    I'm going to work on notifications next. Should be out in about a week.

     
  • At 9:31 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Yay! The only other feature that I need from this is the ability to recieve notifications/alerts.

    I'm assuming that that would mean that Greed would run in the background and automatically retrieve unread articles as well because that would significantly speed up the program's startup.

     
  • At 11:02 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Very promising. Would love to see offline support.

     
  • At 2:20 PM , Blogger Kelly said...

    That should be there in the next update. With the alerts/notifications feature, caching and offline access is an almost-free bonus.

     
  • At 9:59 AM , Blogger Will said...

    Solid app! I have a feature request. It would be awesome if could listen to the podcasts I have subscribed to on G Reader. If you added that feature, it would put all the other RSS/Podcast apps to shame.

     
  • At 7:12 PM , Blogger Adolfo said...

    Due to market constraints (oddly enough the Canadian app market doesn't always stock everything right away) I was wondering if you might post the .apk directly on your site? It helps with staying up to date without having to check the market all the time (which as you might know has a memory management problem which causes me to stay away from it).

     
  • At 6:37 PM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Is Greed open-source? I use it daily and love it, but there are some things I really want to enhance. I would gladly offer these changes back as well in case you find them useful.

    If you haven't already, posting the source code on Google Code would be great, similar to how android-rss have done it: http://code.google.com/p/android-rss/

    This may also help to keep the security-conscience users at bay whilst you are battling with the credentials API.

     
  • At 2:23 AM , Blogger GadgetVirtuoso said...

    Great app but the alert tone needs to be selectable or least able to be set to silent.

     
  • At 9:02 AM , Blogger Kelly said...

    Good point. People keep asking for that, and I know it's on my todo list for the app. I'll move it toward the top of the list.

    Thanks.

     
  • At 4:41 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    I really appreciate your greed android application, bc I am from continental europe I use just lite version yet. To be honour I miss possibility to quickly translate certain words when different languages are used in news channels. It could be something in greed to become even more popular if not the best in case you implement it there. Respect and thanx. I try to make bookreader with on the fly translation of words. The source publishing for paid app does not seem to be realistic, does it? as Sean asked?

     
  • At 12:46 PM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Greed is my favorite program on my phone. I use it multiple times a day since I'm a news junkie. It's one of the very few apps I have bought, let alone given a 5 star rating to.

    Could I request one thing though?

    Every time I open an article, it spawns a new tab in the Browser, but upon exiting back to Greed, that tab doesn't get closed. So in a few minutes, I end up with multiple tabs in my browser, enough that it ends up force closing my browser or making it run at a crawl.

    Closing tabs manually in the browser is a pain since I have big fingers and that X is so tiny.

    Could you make Greed either use the last opened tab, or destroy the newly opened tab when you back out of the browser?

     
  • At 3:14 PM , Blogger Kelly said...

    I will definitely look into that. I think that is the most annoying aspect of the browser. I'll spend some time soon and figure out if there is a way to control how the browser opens a link. I have the same problem, ending up with 8 or so browser tabs open all at the same time.

     
  • At 11:35 PM , Blogger Webreaper said...

    Great App. Makes a good alternative to the flawed and broken Reader that Google have done in the browser.

    I have 2 feature requests:
    1. Sticky settings - I'd like it to go straight to "unread items" without needing to choose from the home screen.
    2. All my articles are titled "xxx's Google reader feeds". Could we have the feed title here instead?

    Cheers. I will be buying the full version. :-)

     
  • At 9:14 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Hi, greed is great but i am having problems playing Podcasts in the background (to be able to to other things while listening). When i want to stream a podcast, without downloading it, i am only offered to play it with Androids default "Music" app or with "aonlineradio". aonlineradio doesn't work and "Music" allows playing only in the foreground. I tried to installs everal mp3-apps but none of them seem to add themselfes to the "choose-app-menu" for streaming music.

     
  • At 10:37 PM , Blogger Kelly said...

    Hi Perfect,

    The Android Music application doesn't do much of a good job of playing in the background when you just stream from the web. I would suggest downloading the media files you want to listen to. When you do that, the Music player will play them in the background. I'm not sure why it won't otherwise.

    Thanks,
    Kelly

     
  • At 8:55 AM , Blogger Gwen Morse said...

    Great job on Greed, I bought the paid version within a day or two of trying it.

    I'd like an option to only poll for new feeds when on wifi. I have a Milestone on TMobile service, which means I only have an Edge data plan. I'd like it to download all my feeds when on Wifi, and save them to the SD card.

    Maybe a Locale plugin would be the best solution?

     
  • At 3:42 PM , Blogger JL said...

    i agree with perfect. just about every podcatcher app i've tried requires you to download the feeds you want to listen to. i find this quite annoying. i would like to see a podcatcher work exactly like google reader except that it would start streaming the item as soon as it is clicked, and automatically move on to the next unlistened to podcast after that. it seems so simple and obvious.

     

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