ReaderScope 1.2.7 - Podcasts, Expanded View

Podcast support was a feature request in one of the market comments. I hadn't thought about it before that. When I looked into how to do it, it turned out to be pretty simple - thanks to Android's easy MediaPlayer API.

If you have subscribed to any podcast in your Google Reader, open it in ReaderScope just like any other feed. When you open a news item that has podcast attached, you will see a speaker icon near the bottom right corner, as shown in the following picture.

Just tap on it. You will see a notification indicating that the Podcast has started playing in the background.

The notification shows the progress through the podcast. If you want to pause or stop it, just tap on the Notification and you will be presented with the options. You can read your other news or even exit ReaderScope, and the podcast will keep playing in the background.

Second feature that made into this version is "Expanded view".

Just press the new menu option - "Expanded Mode" and you will see expanded list of news items with a portion of the news content below each of them. Useful to skim through the news items in a hurry.

Last but not the least, "Periodic Cleanup" feature. In v1.2.5 new options were introduced to cleanup old news items. With the "Periodic Cleanup" feature, you can choose to run the cleanup service at desired intervals. That will keep the storage in check. The periodic cleanup will delete the items that match your specified settings for "Cleanup Age" and "Keep Unread Items" option.

That's it folks. BTW, check out the new Google Reader features the were introduced recently.

Happy Halloween!