fognl

Get off my lawn.

Friday, April 23, 2010

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.

4 Comments:

  • At 2:35 PM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Hi Kerry,

    Just found your blog after trawling market for a decent. Although I can only find greed full 1.1 :-(. I followed a link from one of your previous blogs, to download greed2; unfortunatly it fails to install on my phone. (Greed2 could not be installed on this phone). I'm running a HTC hero with Android 1.5. I saw mention of a 1.6 requirement, and the fact you planned to remove it. Is this the reason or am I missing something?

    I look forward to getting this working. Any more info you might need just shout ;-)

    The Townfool

     
  • At 9:09 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Is there a way I can find what version of Greed I'm running? I just (today) downloaded, bought and installed Greed from the Marketplace, but it doesn't have the features you mentioned here. I'm not sure this is the correct version, but searching for "greed2" or "greed 2" both return nothing relevant.

    Can you help?

     
  • At 9:28 AM , Blogger Kelly said...

    Hi Ben,

    As of right now, the version of Greed described in the postings is the free (Lite) version. The full version (which you bought) is based on the old code base, and is due to be replaced with a "key" application (soon, probably this weekend) that unlocks features in the base version. I've been holding off on updating the Greed Full entry until there are unlockable features in Greed Lite. As of now, the key will turn off the ads currently displayed in Greed Lite. As development progresses, more features will appear for people who paid for the full version.

    You should be able to find the version described here by getting "Greed Lite" from the Market. If you don't mind the ads, you should have time to refund your purchase if you just bought it today. If you choose to keep the full version, you'll get an update notification soon. Kind of confusing, I know!

     
  • At 9:53 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

    Hi Kelly,

    Thank you for your response! I've performed a refund on the app I bought, but can't find anything called "Greed Lite". I searched for "fognl" and all I see is Greed (Full), PokeSite and RingControl.

    I'm in the UK if this makes any difference.

    The plan is to wait for the key app then. I'll almost certainly pay just because tbh, removing ads is a happy bonus! :)

     

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