Greed 2: More widgets

While I'm on a kick to write widgets, both at home and at work, I thought I would put a couple more of them in Greed.

Both of the new widgets fall into the "large" category. One of them shows the latest article title and a short summary of the article. The other one shows a list of the article titles in the feed/label/state you've selected for the feed.

I also changed the background for the widgets to something simpler and cleaner. There's no "Greed" icon in the top left of the widgets anymore, but I kind of like the fact that they're cleaner looking and sort of transparent.

Greed 2: Widget

Greed 2 now has a widget. I added it this weekend. There will be an update later this week which adds some configurability to it for things like update interval, etc. In the meantime, happy Father's Day.

Greed 2: Feeds fix

Just put up a quick update to Greed, which includes 2 things.

First, the feed lists, labels, unread counts, and other ephemera associated with reading Google Reader feeds are stored as XML files now, instead of the binary format I was using before. This was the apparent cause of the slow/interminable load times for the feed list. It should work faster now.

Another item that made it into this update is the "mobile article" option, which uses the Google page compressor URL to allow the download of slimmed-down articles.

That's it for this update, but I'm working on integrating the Widget for an update appearing soon.

Greed 2: Instapaper

The latest version of Greed adds a few features:

Where Was I?

A few people asked for the Where was I feature introduced in the last update to be automatic: Instead of starting at the main menu, just return to the last-read article. I can see how some people would want to do this, but I also realize others (me, for example) wouldn't necessarily want to all the time. So there is a new option to return to Where was I automatically, under the Article Reading section. So you can have it either way.

Instapaper

I also added Instapaper integration. If you haven't heard of it, Instapaper is a handy place to store links for later reading. I implemented this via the Share menu, so it's available to all applications on your phone. So, for example, you can select "Share Page" in the Browser, and the Instapaper option will be available there as well. Essentially anything that lets you share a URL via the Android "SEND" intent should be able to make use of this.

Note that Instapaper integration in Greed is send-only: Greed does not provide an interface for reading Instapaper articles. Of course, you could subscribe to your Instapaper RSS feed and read the articles that way, but that would be a bit redundant I would think.

Subscribe to RSS:

Another action available from external applications is "Subscribe to RSS". For example, in the Browser, select "Share Page" from the menu, and select the "Subscribe to RSS" item. Greed passes the site's URL to Google Reader, and it returns the stream ID of the new feed.

Unfortunate side effect: The "Subscribe to RSS" item appears on the chooser when "Share" is selected from within an RSS article, which is redundant.