As always, it takes longer than expected, but feed7 3.0 is now
finally available. And it's a huge update that brings a ton of new
features and a completely fresh user interface.
We really hope you'll like it. Here's a quick overview of what's
new:
Fresh UI
Here is your new, fresh feed7 UI. It introduces grouping for
feeds, folders and articles for a better overview and a more
structured reading experience. As you can see in the 2nd screenshot
below, articles are grouped into their publish dates.
But it not only gives you more structure in your reading
experience, it also allows you to jump quickly to a specific date.
Just tap one of the group headers and a list of all available dates
will open. Tap it, and feed7 jumps to the date you selected. You
can also navigate up and down through the dates by tapping the
arrows located right in the group header. A fast and easy
navigation through your articles is key - so we put a lot of focus
into that.
But for a quick navigation, it's also important you can quickly
locate the articles you care about. Many of you complained that the
distinction between read and unread articles is too subtle. With
3.0, we introduce the new "bookmark"-tags on the left side of the
articles. The "unread" dot moved there as did the "favorite" star,
but in addition, the bookmark-tag is colored in your accent color
while the article is unread. You now can more easily see and find
your unread articles.
Even more selecting options to manage your articles
The new grouped UI interface brings even more useful features.
For example, selecting multiple articles is now faster and easier
than ever - just tap on the left-side of a group header and the
"checkbox view" is opened and all articles of the selected day get
pre-selected (see first picture below) - and in the AppBar, you
have mark unread, read, star and unstar buttons to immediately mark
all selected articles.
But also, the context menu got improved: as shown in picture 2
above, all items have now a "mark (all) read" context menu option,
even folders: so it's easy to mark a complete feed or folder or
just an individual item as read now.
Automatically download full articles
Everybody knows those news sites that offer only teasers of the
articles in their feeds. Until now, you were able to open the full
article from the website of the site inside feed7 or in the
external browser. Now you have the option to automatically download
those articles over the great Instapaper Mobilizer service
that even formats the article for a good reading experience on your
device.
feed7 detects shortened feeds automatically and asks you if you
want to automatically download the full article (picture 1):
Even more than that, as feed7 is committed to offer the best
offline experience available, you can even go into the settings of
a feed (tap and hold the feed to open it's context menu and select
"settings") to change the full article download behavior to "During
sync" - now, just like image syncing, full articles for this feed
will be downloaded already during sync and cached on your device.
So you have full articles of any site you want at hand even when
you're out of network coverage.
Search within all your articles
An absolutely great new feature is the ability that you now can
search within all your articles on your device. While we're still
working on improving this feature for future versions, it is
already really useful and features such nice handy helpers as
search text highlighting in the results. You'll find the new
"search" AppBar icon nearly in every AppBar now.
New services: Twitter and Facebook
A longtime request by users but we wanted to do it right:
instead of shipping a large OAuth library with feed7 that would
unnecessarily increase the memory footprint of the app, we wrote
our own reduced to only the features that are needed for feed7. It
was a lot of work, but now it's here. Share your articles on
Twitter and Facebook. Coming with those new services is a complete
new Service settings & configuration experience that makes it
much easier to handle with services:
- You can now easily manage and configure services over the
application settings
- Services can now be disabled so they won't show up in the
sharing list on article view
- Sharings of articles can now be queued when you are offline (or
the queuing can also be disabled)
- If you configure your service during the 1st sharing, you won't
have to share it again manually - feed7 resubmits your item right
after a successful service configuration
New "Add Feed" experience
In previous versions, adding new feeds was a bit cumbersome. You
had to decide yourself which way you want to use to add your feed
and different UIs were used depending what you choosed. Also,
searching feeds over Bing was getting worse and worse each month
with nearly unusable results lately.
So, we made two changes:
- First, there is now only one single, simple screen left for
adding feeds (see first picture below). You type into a search term
and depending on what you typed, feed7 will execute the right add
process. If you type a search term, feed7 will search for feeds
matching this term (picture 2). If you typed in any URL (like ) feed7 will discover feeds on the URL you typed, but
additionally it will also perform a standard web search using this
URL. You will get categorized results to distinct the different
ways of search (picture 3). And, 3rd and last possibility, if you
entered a URL that points directly to a feed, feed7 will add this
feed right away without any searches.
- Second change: we dropped Bing and replaced it by Google's more
sophisticated Google Reader feed search. This works also if you are
not using Google Reader to sync your feeds.
This is a major improvement over previous versions. Try it
out!
New categorized settings
While we're at it - as settings options increase more and more,
also the settings screen was overhauled and has now a
categorization:
Other interesting new features
You can now change the sorting of articles from
descending to ascending so you'll see the oldest articles
first.
Image rendering in article view was improved so
no more wrong aspect ratio issues (wrongly stretched images) occur.
Also, in many cases floating text left- or right-hand of the
article image is now prevented.
Item tags (read/unread, starred) are now synced
immediately with Google Reader after an item tag changes.
This not only makes a complete sync faster, but it also makes
changes on Google Reader visible more instantly.
We also improved performance and data usage by making
all data traffic using compression.
Sharing of articles on Google Reader was
removed as Google retired this feature a couple of months
ago.
We're also fixed a lot of bugs, updated some 3rd party controls,
removed the Silverlight Toolkit completely (and replaced the
controls this library offered by more sophisticated and better
performing ones) to reduce the memory footprint of the app and
greatly improve performance.
Wrapping up and what's next
In general, this is a huge update we wish we'd be able to
deliver earlier, but some trouble with new features and also with
3rd party controls that needed to be tracked down and fixed to
reach the quality that was needed delayed this release for a couple
of months. Despite the long time it took to get this release live,
there were still a lot of planned 3.0 features pulled back for
later releases.
However, we're happy with this release and start now working on
improving it. As always when such big releases with many
fundamental changes arrive, there will be bugs and we'll trying to
fix them as fast as possible. At the time of this release, we were
already aware of some minor issues of some controls we're using,
but we decided to go live and wait no longer. Our vendor is working
hard on delivering fixes and we will push out a first bugfix and
maintenance update for 3.0 very likely by the end of next week.
Afterwards, no other "big" release is planned right now, instead
we'll try to push out more but much smaller feature updates that
improve 3.0 - we're currently waiting for more details on Windows
Phone 8 before planning for the next major (4.0) release.