Greed 2: ClientLogin

Just pushed a Greed update. The main point of this update is the conversion of the authentication to Google's ClientLogin API. The old SID-based authentication is going away soon.

Also, I read a couple of comments on the Market today, one of which was about the "useless clutter" on the UI. For people who feel offended by the clutter, there's a new option under the "User Interface" section of the preferences, aptly named "Hide Clutter." Check it, and the items in the feed, folder and article lists contain nothing but the title and unread counts. Can't get less cluttered than that...

Greed 2: Offline access

Just pushed an update to Greed that contains what a few have been waiting for, offline access.

Articles
Basically, it allows you to read articles (including RSS articles and the articles they link to) offline. All articles are cached to your SD card when you read them. The old version of Greed did the same thing, and would try to "magically" update articles automatically, by reading a list of articles cached on disk and then turning around and reading from the web and updating the disk. It was trying to strike a balance between "fast" and "up to date", but mostly struck a balance between "annoyance" and "irritation." So this new version doesn't do that. If you want to get a fresh list of articles in a given feed, select "Refresh", and the articles for that feed will be downloaded again. Simple.

How to download:

To download a single article's contents, go to the article and click the "Download" item in the options menu. This will download the page the article is linked to, and any attachments on the article that can be downloaded will be downloaded. For now, images aren't downloaded along with the article, but that's coming.

To download multiple articles, go to the article list and click the little check mark next to each article you want to download. When you've got them all, click the "download" icon in the panel at the bottom. The download starts immediately. If you're so inclined, you can watch the download progress in the Downloads screen (accessible from the Downloads item on the main menu).

To download whole feeds, go to the "Feeds" list and click the little checkbox to the left of each feed you want to download. As you do this, a little panel will appear at the bottom of the list. Click the "cache" icon [image]. Linked pages and attachments for each article in the feed will be downloaded.

To download everything: You have a few choices here. You can go into the preferences and set it to download all feeds and all content, and let it rip. However, if you have a lot of feeds with attachments, you could end up filling up your SD card, and it will take a long time. I'd suggest plugging it into a charger, and doing this overnight. You can also set Greed to download only what you've selected. In this case, the "download everything" action will only download the contents of feeds that have the little "disk" icon turned on. To use this feature, go into the Feeds list and click the checkmark next to each item you want to select for caching, then click the little "disk" icon so it's on (white, not gray). Then go to the main menu and select "Cache All." d

How to see downloads:

To look at a downloaded page for an article, go to the article you're interested in, and click "Saved Article."

To look at an attachment: This depends on the type of attachment. If it's a podcast, you can access it from the Music player application. It should show up in your list of songs. You can also access attachments by clicking the paper-clip icon in an article. However, from here, the music player will stop when you press "back" to go somewhere else. (I'm working on this.)

How to remove downloads:

You can do this from pretty much the same places as you download things from.

In the Feeds list, click the check box on a given feed or set of feeds, and hit the [icon] button. All downloads for the selected feeds (including articles and attachments) will be cleared out. You can do the same thing for articles in the Article list.

Within a single article, you can clear the downloads for the article from items on the options menu. For attachments, you can long-press an attachment in the list and select "Clear Download" to get rid of it.

In other news:

Ads. I'm giving them a try. The Full version of Greed won't have them.

Icons on the main menu: Something to look at, I suppose...

A few other near-trivial items.

Next up: I need to fix the authentication Greed uses when getting to Google Reader. I'm going to do that next. Then, I'm going to work on some of the graphics. I'm not an artist, so the graphics in some places look pretty bad. Also, a widget will happen in there somewhere.

Greed 2: Friends

I just pushed an update to Greed that replaces the "Friends' Shared Items" view with a "Friends" item that displays a list of Google Reader users you're associated with either by following them or being followed by them. Each Friend is treated as a feed, with its own unread count, etc. You can see the details or a friend (and optionally un-follow them) by long-pressing and selecting "Details" on an item in the list. From there, you can see a rudimentary set of their information (e-mail addresses, listed websites, location).

That's pretty much it for this update.

Greed 2: Happy Easter

It's a long weekend, today's my birthday, and tomorrow's Easter.

To commemorate all of this, I did the obvious thing and pushed another Greed update.

Folders: This screen is now tabbed. There's a tab for the existing "Folders" list, plus another one with the folders in a "flat" list. The tabs are kind of cool looking too.

Notifications: I did some testing and verified that the service definitely runs reliably. I changed the way it tracks updates to unread items. It now accumulates updated feeds until you open the notification. So, for example, if you have notifications set to cycle every hour and you get 3 notifications, you'll get all of them when you read the updated feeds. Before, you'd get the ones from the last cycle.

Article List: I took a cue from Gmail and added a little panel to the article list that pops up whenever you select the check mark on the left of one or more articles in the article list. The panel contains read/starred/shared/liked checkboxes, plus a "share" button. When you click one of the items on the panel, whatever you click is applied to the selected articles, and the panel disappears. I kind of like it for doing a specific thing to multiple items.

another test post

just testing notifications.

test post

test post

So, I'm reading news articles...

April Fool's Day is a pretty annoying day. I'm reading through some news articles while I work, and I seriously can't tell (at a glance) which ones are true, and which ones aren't.

For example:

• The iPad has been reviewed in a few places, and reports are that the battery life is really good and it will actually change computing forever.
• Truckers are going to be banned from texting while driving.
• Obama wants to drill for oil off of America's shores.
• There's a company giving away body piercings with the purchase of a server.
• Microsoft is accusing Google Chrome of being insecure because it combines the URL bar and search fields into one.
• Lawmakers are asking for an FTC investigation of Google Buzz because the rollout of same exposed users' private information to outsiders.
• Will Smith is reportedly "in" for Independence Day 2 and 3.

Each of these has at least one aspect of "huh?" to it. As in "Huh? Obama wants to drill for oil? Obama?", or "Huh? Microsoft seriously thinks the combining of two fields into one is cause for security concerns in a competitor's product? Microsoft?"

It's annoying either way. Either everybody (specifically, Slashdot) is running the whole "April Fool's Day Joke" thing into the ground by publishing nothing but jokes, or humanity is so short of things to do that the above counts as actual news.