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Sunday, June 07, 2009

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.

6 Comments:

  • At 1:49 AM , Blogger Pavel Jaroš said...

    Hi, I would like to buy your app, but I have no access to paid apps on Android Market (users from some countries are limited so far, Czech Republic in my case). Is there any chance to buy Greed in other way. For example to pay via PayPal and you would send me it to my e-mail. Thanks for your answer.

     
  • At 12:02 AM , Blogger Kelly said...

    Pavel,

    Yes, I could do that. If you go to http://fognl.com/android/greed/donate.html, you can use the PayPal donate link there to donate, then let me know either via e-mail, and I'll e-mail you a link to a copy of Greed.

    Thanks,
    Kelly

     
  • At 1:49 PM , Blogger Skyfall said...

    This comment has been removed by the author.

     
  • At 1:52 PM , Blogger Skyfall said...

    I'm guessing none of these features will be coming to the free version? Is there a full listing of features the paid for version has over the free version because I'm interested in buying but not sure exactly what I'd be paying for :)

    Oh and is it possible to code an alternative to those left and right (forward and back) arrows on the article screen? As I find them a little intrusive.

    Either way it's a great app :)

     
  • At 12:01 AM , Blogger Kelly said...

    Skyfall,

    Sorry, I'm pretty fond of those buttons. :-) Actually, I was thinking of shrinking them. They're starting to seem a little big.

    As far as features in the paid app that aren't in the free one: I've been working on the paid app on and off since March or so, so there are quite a few. At a high level, here are the ones I can think of:

    . Offline support
    . Podcast support
    . Notifications (that really work :-))
    . Optimizations to reduce the number of times Greed has to log into Google Reader to do things
    . Cupcake compatibility
    . Scaled images in the article viewer
    . Better memory use
    . Folders view displays as a tree
    . A few bug fixes (:-))

    Seems like there should be more... I know there are, but I can't remember them at the moment.

     
  • At 9:22 AM , Blogger Skyfall said...

    Hi me again, I have tried to purchase this application on the android market but it keeps telling me that I need to input a valid card, but my card is valid and have bought apps previously.

    I have heard that sellers can restrict which countries they accept payments from, do you accept payments from the UK?

    If you do I'll take this up with Google, if not I will make a donation and request the app if that's ok :)

     

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