ReaderScope 1.0

Now that ADC2 submissions are done, I am glad to release ReaderScope with its entire feature set as a 1.0 release.



The 1.0 release includes a bunch of new featuers. They include variety of new sharing options (SMS, Email, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter), deep caching, smart customizations that let you save on battery/network, more organized settings, pleasant color scheme, pretty icons, collapsible feed navigation on opening screen, friendly timestamps and many other tiny improvements.

Here is a detailed look at the new feature set.

Sharing

The control panel (that gets summoned by 'menu' button while on news page), now allows 9 different actions to perform on the news - Star, Share, Mark unread/read, Open link, Twitter, SMS, Email, Digg, Del.icio.us. At a time 7 of these are available on the panel. When you press email, your configured email program will be called and an email will be composed for you with contents of the news item. When you hit SMS, an SMS message will be composed with the title of the news and a shortened URL. With the Digg button, you can check if the news is available on Digg. If the news is found on digg, its digg count and a list of latest comments is shown. With the del.icio.us button, you can bookmark the news in your Del.icio.us account. (First time you will be asked to enter your credentials).

Due to the limit on the size of control panel, only 7 action buttons can be accomodated. You can choose them from the total 9, using the Settings->Action controls option.

Deep Caching

There are news channels which post only a brief part of the news in their RSS/Atom feed. To read rest of the news, reader has to visit their webpage. This is inconvinient when reading news offline. With the Deep Caching feature, you can tell ReaderScope to cache the news webpages with complete news for offline access. Just head to Settings->Periodic Downloads and push "Feeds for Deep Caching". From the list of feeds choose the ones you want to deep cache. Note that you need to have this feed also among your favorite feeds. Also you need to have checked "Cache Images" check box.

[Caveat: the deep cached webpage with the complete news item is only stored in text, and you won't see the embedded images while offline]

Smart savings


In the Settings->Smart savings you can tweak ReaderScope behavior to save resources. You can choose to automatically disable periodic downloads if battery is below certain level. You can also choose to not perform periodic downloads if the network is not suitable. In addition, you can selectively delete news items from the database to clean up some space. You can also cleanup the cached web content from this screen.

Organized Settings

As you have noticed thus far, the settings are now categorized into 5 kinds. They should be self-explanatory.

UI improvements

The opening page is now made of collapsible lists. Each tag now can be collapsed into a single line. This makes navigating through your feeds more convenient. This layout adapts to your choices of favorite feeds/tags. They are put on the top for quick access. Also check Settings->Miscellaneous for couple more ways you can tweak this layout. ... and I hope you like the new color scheme.

And yes.... did I mention the app is still entirely FREE?

ReaderScope is also a contestant in ADC2, so if you like the app, rate it in the ADC2 judging process.

The app is now available at two places - Android Market and Slideme.

Happy Reading!!!

ReaderScope beta4 - offline fun

Beta 4 is about some new features that make offline browsing better.

The news items (including embedded images) are now cached (if you choose the option in Settings). Moreover the actions you perform offline, like marking news items read/unread/starred/unstarred/shared/unshared are remembered and when you go online next time, you can sync these actions with a tap of a button.

Now here are some details.

If you want to read your news items complete with images when you are offline, you should go to settings, choose your favorite feeds/tags to cache and mark this checkbox.

Now when your favorite feeds get downloaded during periodic/manual download, the news contents will be cached. You can also verify that by looking at the progress bar in notifications towards the end of download.
Note that, ReaderScope leverages WebView's caching capabilities. (WebView is part of Browser). Therefore you need to have enabled the Browser's cache. Also clearing Browser's cache will lead to loosing the cached images too. (The text will still remain intact).

Now about the second feature. When you read/star/share a news item, the action is instantly synced with Google Reader. However when you are offline, this is not possible. Starting from beta4, such operations are now noted in the database. When you perform these actions, you will see this message

At the same time you will see a notification in the status bar.

You can continue reading news offline. After you get back online. Just pull down the notifications area and tap on the above notification. It will automatically sync the actions with Google Reader, showing progress as follows:

In addition, some fixes were done in the code to handle scenarios when network connectivity is lost in the middle of browsing the news. As David reported in comments to last post, such scenario locked the UI at the circling progress bar. The fixes now take care of that. Wherever possible, the network operations are not started without checking the connectivity. If the network should disconnect in the middle of a download, then the progress bar will go away at the most in 30 seconds followed by proper error message.

So give it a shot! I have tried my best to consider various n/w outage scenarios, but it's not easy to cover all possible cases. So if you still see any problems, please let me know in the comments.

ReaderScope beta3 - Tweet the news

I am yet to find a straight-forward hassle free way to share my Google Reader news on my Twitter. There are many ways to do it on a desktop (Twitterfeed, "Send to" option), but none I could find is a one-click yet customizable option. With ReaderScope beta3 I am trying to solve that problem at least for the Android phone.

You like the news and want to tweet about it? Press Menu, Press the "t" icon. (If you are not logged in, you will be asked to do so first time). You will get a box to type your twit, while the URL is getting shortened in background. After the short URL is ready, insert it (with/without news title). Edit the twit if you want to and hit Post.


Now about the problem mentioned in Market comments:

There was a bug in beta1 that manifested itself in terms of empty lists. If the user presses "Refresh" on first screen and tries to visit a feed he/she has tried to read before hitting refresh; then they will end up with an empty list - with only the title on the top and an unread count. This problem was fixed in beta2. But if you upgraded from beta1 to beta2, the old database stayed unchanged and you will again see the problem. Therefore, if you tried beta1 and are now trying beta2/3, just make sure you uninstall beta1 first.

If you still find any problem in this or other area, please post here on the blog OR tweet me (@jyro). If you post on the Android Market, I will be able to read it (via cyrket), but I haven't found a way to post my comments to the Market. I believe the only way is through the Android Market app on phone (which I don't have at this point). I have managed to communicate through the Package description a bit, but it's a very crude work around with 325 char limit. So try to post here.

Enjoy the beta3!

ReaderScope Beta2

Spent last couple of days working on the UI and fixing few bugs. Just uploaded beta2 to the Android market. Here is the list of what's in beta2

• Improvements to the news item view.
  
• News is shown using WebView now. You can now read the post as it is rendered on the webpage (with images and formatting)
  
  
  


• The panel of buttons (star, share, etc.) is hidden by default. This gives maximum space to the actual news item. It can be summoned by pressing the "Menu" button.
• Two arrow buttons on both sides of the title let you load previous or next news item in the list, without going back to the item list.


• Fixed a bug that will most likely resolve the issue mentioned in the first comment in Android Market. It was due to a Database update glitch.
  
• Some more fixes went into properly handling the scenarios in offline mode. They will be handled gracefully now and wherever cache is available news items will be displayed. (For the images to load however network is needed)

So try it out!

ReaderScope beta1 is out

Just published beta1 of my second Android app - ReaderScope. It's a Google Reader client for Android.

The goal is to develop simple android-native interface for accessing Google Reader. ReaderScope just takes your credentials (login takes place over secure http connection), fetches the data from your Google Reader account and presents it using Android's native GUI elements. Check out the screenshots below. You can also download your favorite feeds in bulk and then read them offline.



At present the news items are displayed in text-only format. This minimal approach is suitable for a phone. However, an option to display images is also in the works.

Give it a spin and let me know what you think. You can post it in comments here, or tweet them to me (@jyro) or I can check your market comments via cyrket.

Makeshift XML beautifier in python

Lately I had to deal with some XML dumps. It's a pain to analyse XML if it's not properly indented. Browsers do the best job of rendering XML. Those collapsable XML elements are very handy. But they work only if the XML file is downloaded with right MIME type. That's why XML dumped to a local file and opened using a browser doesn't get the same treatment.

I am sure there are other XML beautifiers, but I couldn't find one that will work for me. (I am sure in comments someone will post better solutions). Finally following simple python script did the trick. I found it here and corrected a little to take care of </> tags. It worked perfectly on many XML dumps I worked with.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import re

data = open(sys.argv[1],'r').read()

fields = re.split('(<.*?>)',data)
level = 0
for f in fields:
   if f.strip() == '': continue
   if f[0]=='<' and f[1] != '/':
       print ' '*(level*4) + f
       level = level + 1
       if f[-2:] == '/>':
           level = level - 1
   elif f[:2]=='</':
       level = level - 1
       print ' '*(level*4) + f
   else:
       print ' '*(level*4) + f

It's all about keeping track of depth.