ReaderScope 2.0.6 - Find Comments

If you didn't notice, in recent releases the Digg and Reddit social beacons were missing. They were removed some time ago to make space for a better method of discovering comments. I had released a stand-alone app FindComments few weeks ago. It uses ContextVoice to find comments from all sources (Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and many more). In v2.0.6 that app is integrated with ReaderScope. You will see a new icon on the action panel, which you can tap to find comments on the current news item from all over the web.

Try it on some popular news stories from Slashdot or XKCD to see how it works.

ReaderScope 1.9 - OAuth

For past month or so, some of you (ReaderScope users) might be facing problems if you were using AutoLogin. This happened after I updated the login mechanism in v1.8.2 to support Google Reader authentication changes. I won't go into the details, but AutoLogin is very likely to fail in the new scheme of authentication. So I advised some of you who sent me the error reports to switch to Username/Password login. It was a temporary solution.

Today I am glad to announce that starting with v1.9 ReaderScope supports OAuth login for Google Reader - the right way to login without password (compared to other password less alternatives at least).

This has been possible only after Google Reader team enabled OAuth login for their service a few weeks ago. I have been working since to get ReaderScope working with OAuth. Not all the time was spent on OAuth, but in order to implement OAuth I had redesign entire networking layer of ReaderScope (which I am glad I did because I could improve some things along the way).

Finally RS with OAuth is ready. If you were still using AutoLogin, then after upgrading to v1.9 you will get a warning message that AutoLogin is no longer supported and you will be automatically logged out. On restart you will be taken to Login screen where you can start doing OAuth login.

If you are using username/password, then after upgrading to v1.9 you will get a message informing that a new password less login option is available. You won't be forcefully logged out though. You can choose to logout and relogin.

I have been testing most of the functionality in past couple of days. But I won't be surprised if some holes were left out. Please report any problems you might face or sent crash reports if you get any.

Enjoy the upgrade!

ReaderScope 1.8.{2,3} - new authentication and global share

I released 1.8.2 couple of days ago. The only change it had was the new login mechanism. Google reader team announced on fougrapi group (that stands for "Friends of the Unofficial Google Reader API") that Google Reader soon will be discontinuing the old SID-based login mechanism. Thanks to them for announcing this well before the actual change is supposed to happen (sometime in April). ReaderScope accordingly has been updated to follow the new rules.

This change is almost painless for username/password based logins. However the  AutoLogin is a little hairy issue. The library used to get AutoLogin working is unsupported and undocumented. There is an official way to do AutoLogin kind of thing on Android 2.0 devices, but it requires access to actual device to test and still I hear it's not well documented. Besides the devices at versions <2.0 are going to be there for  a long time. Therefore I got the undocumented and unsupported library to get working somehow with the new auth mechanism. However the changes I had to make were only little short of hocus-pocus. So I was very skeptical about how it was working. I released a preview on ReaderScope mailing list. So far the feedback of the preview release and actual 1.8.2 has been positive. I haven't seen anyone reporting issues due to failed logins. I have strategic log statements to detect if things go wrong with authentication. So just mail me the logs if you see suspicious behavior. Settings > Logs. Menu > Email.

Today in 1.8.3, I also fixed a bug which would have caused auth problems if anyone was upgrading from pre-1.2.5 installation.

With the new authentication done, I have a very exciting feature implemented in 1.8.3.

When you share the news item now, you will have option to trigger the global sharing apps. They could be your favorite Twitter, Facebook, Email clients. The most useful one I found was "Read It Later" which lets you save the news item to your InstaPaper account for reading later. These are the same apps that you see when you "Share Page" from browser.

I remember someone had requested this feature once long time ago. I am sorry it took so long to implement. But now that it is here, I am sure you will enjoy it.

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ReaderScope 1.8.1 - rethinking features

In the release-early-release-often model, as the software product evolves over time, new features get added consistently. The same happened with ReaderScope for over 7 months. It started with very basic functionality and went through many iterations to reach at its current state.

Adding lot of new features however has couple of risks. First one is affecting the performance. I try to keep that under control after completing a round of new features. Memory footprint analysis and some latency measurement checks have helped to keep the ReaderScope UI very responsive over time. The second downside of features is loosing the direction, unknowingly causing a feature creep. So once in a while, it is essential that the software developer steps back a little and reviews the direction his/her software is going in. That's what I am doing in this post.

There is one feature in ReaderScope that I added few months back that I am not sure helps the main direction of the app. It is the tabbed interface. When I added it, my intent was to cater news from channels besides Google Reader. I put the Google News feeds under the News tab and was planning to add more feeds from popular news channels too. The third tab was Social. It had only a single feed for Twitter account. It smartly parsed the Twitter messages and extracted the news items pointed by the embedded links. (I love the Twitter feature and it's not going away, read below... actually nothing is going away for that matter).

Over time I have realized that the tabs are not serving any useful purpose for most of the userbase. I would rather spend time improving the Google Reader specific functionality than supporting the half baked extra tabs.

Therefore starting from v1.8.1 the tabs are disabled by default. You will only see the labels and feeds from your Google Reader account just like old days. The "Social Channels" label (which was part of the Social tab) will now appear at the bottom of your Google Reader List. If you want you can configure it to appear at the top or be invisible altogether (Settings > Customize Layout).

And for some reason if you like the tabs, you still have option. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous > Enable Tab Interface. You will get the old interface back.

One more feature is the favicons. Favicons are pretty if you read the feeds that do have favicons. However, not all users may have subscribed to feeds that publish favicons. Out of my 250+ feeds at least 150+ show valid favicons. But for some users most of their feeds may not be publishing any favicons. For them the favicon placeholder appears empty. If they are using dark themes then these placeholders appear as white rounded squares. Understandably, those users would like to turn off the favicon feature. Now they can. Head over to Settings > Value Pack > Load FavIcons and uncheck the box if you  want. (The favicon feature concerns only the Value Pack users. You haven't got one yet? It's only $2.49, hurry!)

I hope these changes simplify the UI for you. Let me know how you like it.

v1.8.1 also has one crash fix. There was a bug which could lead to crash if you immediately quit the app after starting it. It was specific to Value pack owners. It is fixed in this version.

ReaderScope 1.8 - Random

Just pushed out v1.8 of ReaderScope. Added a new feature after a long optimization-bugfix cycles in v1.7.x.

When I added home screen widget in ReaderScope, I realized how convenient it was to directly jump to the news items from the home screen, instead of opening the app and sliding through two screens. Typically during a news reading session we want to go through all the new items in all our favorite feeds. We don't necessarily care in what order. So to ease this use case, ReaderScope 1.8 introduces "Random".

When you open RS you will see a new label named "Random" at the top. When you tap on the arrow next to this label, you will directly jump to a news item. You can then use down arrow button to go to the next randomly chosen news item.

Now here is a killer. When you tap on the widget on home screen, you will be taken directly to the news item which will also have up-down arrows. It will work the same way mentioned above. In other words, you may go through all your unread news items without opening the full ReaderScope app. Just place the widget on home screen. (Note that, the full widget functionality is only available if you have the value pack installed. It's just $2.49. What are you waiting for? :)

Go ahead, update to v1.8 and let me know what you think.

And yes, do you want a FREE unlock code for the value pack. The Promotional Offer #2 is on for this weekend. First 5 people who twit about ReaderScope will get FREE unlock codes in email. It's not necessary to say only nice things, just twit your opinion about @readerscope and you will qualify for the offer. You can do this from inside the app too. Just go to Settings -> Spread the Word and you will know what to do.

P.S. I also fixed a database update issue in this release, which may concern few users who are upgrading from very old RS version (like  pre1.3)

ReaderScope 1.5 - quicker, better, prettier

ReaderScope 1.5 is ready for the holidays. With the latest improvements it gives the best Google Reader experience out there for your Android phone.

ReaderScope now uses non-blocking UI and the items are now loaded progressively. What does that mean? See it yourself.

As you know, the app is free in various markets. The themes (including the 'Santa' theme in above video) are part of a Theme Pack, which can be purchased for a ONLY $2.49 $3.49

Big thanks to the beta testers who helped testing the unstable 1.5 builds for over a week. Thank you guys!

Also if you like ReaderScope, vote for it at Android Arcade Facebook app.

ReaderScope 1.4 (with a Theme Pack)

Yes, now you don't have to stare at the black and khaki interface of ReaderScope. With 1.4, ReaderScope adds a theme pack. Right now it comes with three themes which look far more pleasant than the legacy color scheme. Also the Theme Pack is the first premium add-on to ReaderScope. You can buy it for only $3.49, from here. You can see the preview in the Theme switcher, just go to Settings -> Themes.

In future more themes will be added to the theme pack and you can get access to all of them, for just $3.49.

Go on, give it a try.

ReaderScope v1.3.3 - offline podcasts

ReaderScope primarily started as an Android app to access Google Reader from the phone. Over time however, various features were added as they proved complimentary to the act of news reading - like sharing the news with friends (Twitter, SMS, Email); bookmarking it (Del.icio.us); reading what others think about it (Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed); support for rich forms of news, i.e. podcasts and youtube videos, etc.

This release improves one of those fringe features, that of Podcasts. ReaderScope supports scheduled download of news items for reading offline. However that wasn't supported for podcasts yet. This release tries to address that problem a bit.

Now as you click on a podcast beacon, you will be asked whether you want to play the podcast right away or just download it for later listening.


If you choose to download, it will start downloading in the background (with progress in the notification). When the download is complete, you can listen to it by clicking on the notification. You can do this when you are offline too.

Furthermore, you can choose to download multiple podcasts simultaneously. They will download in parallel and will be accessible via their independent notifications.

You can listen to them one by one after they are downloaded. When the podcast ends or if you choose to stop it; the local downloaded file is automatically deleted freeing the storage it occupies.

How do you like it? Let me know.

Also in this release there are some bug fixes. There was a glitch in the Google News and Twitter news features. If you were to sync your feeds with "Thorough" option, the feeds under Google News and Social Channels would disappear. This release fixes that problem.

That's it for now. Upgrade to v1.3.3 and let me know if there's any problem.

Cheers!

ReaderScope v1.3.2 - Social Channels

Few months back I realized that all the stories I read in my slashdot or ars-technica feeds seemed kinda ... stale. Why? Because most of the interesting ones I had already read - through links posted by the people I follow on Twitter. It is now a cliché to say that Twitter is the fastest medium of spreading news. Consequently, it's the news channel that delivers the latest news. Moreover, it's the news that you care about most; because it is coming from the people you have chosen to follow.

So how can a modern news reader be complete without incorporating this real time news channel.

In v1.3.2, ReaderScope introduces Social Channels.


You will see a third tab "Social" when you start the upgraded ReaderScope. You will find a preset Twitter subscription there. When you tap on it, you will be asked to login to Twitter (if you haven't already). Once it gets Twitter credentials, you can tap it again and it will download you twitter timeline. It won't show you all the twits (that is for dedicated twitter clients). Instead, it will go through all the twits and will pick the ones that have embedded links in them. ReaderScope will fetch the stories/pictures/videos pointed to by those links and when it's done, they will be presented to you as news items (with the original twits as yellow subtext).



How do you like that?

You can also schedule the Twitter subscription for periodic download.

You will see lot of other improvements in this version too, especially the item list (it now has author and timestamp, right in the list). The news fetched from Google News channels, looks fresh (unread) now; instead of dull in color. The unread counts have been fixed too.

On Podcast front: the ones that take too long "Preparing" (because of long time in buffering over slow network) can now be stopped.

So download the upgrade and enjoy.

And yes... in case you haven't noticed yet, ReaderScope is now accepting donations. ReaderScope is available FREE of cost for everyone to use. Some users who are avid news readers, will see great value in it. While others may not. So it's up to you to decide what's ReaderScope worth to you. If you can express it in terms of $$, you will help towards further development of ReaderScope. You can find the donate button on this page

... better yet, let me paste that button right here. :)

Thanks for all your support. More features are coming to ReaderScope. Show your support and help it improve.

Cheers!

ReaderScope v1.3 - Beyond Google Reader

Google Reader gives us choice in News Reading. With the advent of RSS aggregators, we got the power to subscribe to selective sources of news. That way we can fetch the up-to-date information from the selective sources that we prefer. This saves us time. We build a focused channel to acquire our daily diet of news.

However there is a flip side to that. What if an important news is unrolling that is outside the scope of our news channel. It's being reported by a publisher that we are not subscribed to. In that case we miss out the hotness of a news.

What if after the same routine of reading your regular list of feeds, you get bored. You miss that element of surprise that one gets by reading random headlines.

For the times like this, ReaderScope v1.3 introduces some new features that go beyond Google Reader.

You can now read "Google News" in a separate tab, alongside Google Reader feeds. The tab lists six different categories of news: Headlines, World News, Sports, Entertainment, Business, Sci/Tech. You can now stay up-to-date with the latest happenings in any of these areas.

In addition to that, ReaderScope now offers the latest Google Reader feature: "Popular Items". As the official Google Reader Blog says:

We use algorithms to find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions), collect them in the new Popular items section and order them by what we think you'll like best. Now you don't have to be embarrassed about missing that hilarious video everyone is talking about — it should show up in your "Popular items" feed automatically.

Now you can access the same list from ReaderScope.

In addition, you can now access other lists that were absent in ReaderScope untils now: "All Items", "Starred", "Shared".

You may feel that there is not enough space on screen for all this stuff. If you feel so, you can customize the elements to get more space. The tab panel that lets you choose between Google news and Reader, disappears automatically as you start browsing the news. In the Google Reader's feed list, if you don't want the extra labels, just go to "Settings -> Customize Layout" and you will be able to rearrange all of them.

And yes, ReaderScope is now Android 1.6 ready - for bigger and smaller screens.

So update your copy and enjoy!

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!

ReaderScope 1.2.3 - Search

Search box is implicit for any Google product. Google Reader offers one too. Searching through your hundreds of feeds, folders is really handy. With v1.2.3 the same search functionality comes to ReaderScope.

You can search through all items, or individual feeds or tags. Pressing search menu button on first screen will let you search through "All items". Pressing search menu button on second screen will let you search through whatever feed or tag you are browsing on that screen currently. The search box will indicate the scope of your search.

Besides this feature, the functionality of updating the unread counts is implemented completely in this version. In v1.2.2 only the GUI was updated to reflect changes in unread counts. But actual update in database was disabled because of performance issues. In v1.2.3 the syncing with database is deferred till the end. So now you will see a "Syncing database" progress dialog before you close the app.

In v1.2.2, some fixes went in that take care of crashes people were seeing. No obvious crashes have been reported since, so I hope everything is going well. BTW, Did you like the loading screen? :)

Cheers!

ReaderScope 1.2.1 - Auto Login

Today I came across this excellent article "5 Nice Apps I refuse to use" by Chuck Falzone. It talks about how all the Google Reader apps (or android app that needs access to Google services) ask for passwords to the user's Google account. As you know ReaderScope does it too. But I completely empathized with the author's point of view. For many like me, Google is the biggest closet in their wired home. Giving the key to this closet to any random app is scary for sure.

However, of all the login mechanisms I found out, the only supported method for a desktop/mobile app is asking user to enter his/her username and password. Google supports OAuth, but only for web apps. I wish they implement version of OAuth for desktop/mobile apps, just like Twitter. Another way, is to get the login tokens from Android platform. Although, it should be available as platform API, it is not. I guess the reason is, it will be limited only to 'Google experience' phones, hence it cannot be part of the platform.

But, thanks to the article I mentioned above, more info came out on this discussion. From the article I learnt, that a Google Reader widget accesses Google Account info available on phone. I went through the comments, and one of them gave a pointer to how this might be done. After following the email thread, I found a way to do this. The solution is not perfect/ideal. It uses a library put together by a Google engineer (@jbqueru), but it is not an official part of platform. With the help of ubikdroid's example code from the thread, I put together an "AutoLogin" feature for ReaderScope (as of v1.2.1)

If you are using a 'Google Experience' phone (or a ROM with Google Apps), then you don't have to give your password to ReaderScope. Just press AutoLogin and you are in.

If the existing users want to remove their password (which by the way is encoded before storage) from ReaderScope and use this new auth mechanism, then you can do so without loosing your cached items. Go to Settings->Credentials Management. Press "Logout". Choose "No" to the prompt of deleting cache. The app will exit. Start it again, you will be taken to Login screen. Now choose AutoLogin.

If your phone is not 'Google Experience' phone, this will not work. You will get an error message.

I put this together in past few hours. Although it has passed my automated regression tests, there might be some rough edges. Let me know if you see any problems.

ReaderScope v1.2

After 1 week of reimplementation of news cache, 1 day of testing and 1 last hour of crazy epiphanies and patches... v1.2 is out.

Here is what is new.

With the brand new caching scheme, you can store your bulky news cache on SDCard. Right now my HTC magic is pulling about 1000 images from web (which must be total 10-20MB in size), but the app manager shows ReaderScope only taking 588KB on phone. Because all the content is going to the SDCard.

Also if you do periodic downloads with caching the content, you will notice that the subsequent downloads will take significantly shorter times. This is because, the new caching mechanism accurately downloads only the content that's not in the cache.

In addition, there are few new features that users have been asking for.

Mark All As Read

You can mark all the items in a feed read. Does the same function as its counterpart in Google Reader web interface.

Share with note

You can just "Share", or you can add a note if you wish. Again same job as its counterpart in Google Reader web interface.

Manual override to go offline

One loyal user of ReaderScope has been asking for this feature for a while. It has very practical use for certain. I finally got around to implementing it in v1.2. There are situations when you are online, but you don't want ReaderScope to use the network (because it costs $$). You could already customize the periodic background downloads to not use such specific network. But, you may want to restrict GUI's access to the network too. While you are reading the news, ReaderScope marks the items read, stars/shares them if you choose - this is synced with Google Reader over network.

With the "Go Offline" button, all these front-end actions will be batched instead of doing instant sync over the network (and you will see them in the Pending notification at the top, the one you see when you are actually offline). When you want to go online with the right kind of network, choose "Go Online" and tap on the notification, it will sync your actions.

Moreover, some bug fixes have also gone in.

Hopefully you will enjoy the new version. It's not unlikely that some silly bugs went unnoticed during this big rewrite of the caching mechanism. If you see any problems or hit any crashes, please email me the crash report (using the in built crash reporter).

Enjoy!

ReaderScope 1.1.3 - SDCard storage

Update: Just released 1.1.3a. Thanks to Fernando, found a hidden bug in a background thread. the 'a' version fixes it.

As the time goes by, ReaderScope accumulates lot of news and metadata. It resides in a SQLite database on the phone. The cached webpages reside in a separate WebView cache - also on the phone. After a few days with the device, everyone comes to know how scarce the phone memory is. So it's a good practice for an app to store its data store on the external SDCard. In v1.1.3 ReaderScope facilitates putting the database on the SDCard. Just head to Settings -> Storage Management. Choose the "Database Storage Location" to be "SDCard".

You will also be prompted if you want to migrate your current database contents to the new location. In future, if you want to move the database back to the phone (maybe to replace the existing SDCard with a new one); that is possible too.

This should help saving some space on the phone. However this is only half the job. The WebView cache has a sizable footprint on the phone storage. The work to get it to SDCard is in progress.

Another addition in this version is the "Feed Filter" option. I hope it will improve the usability for the people who prefer to read only the latest downloaded news.

I have also set up a Google Group to discuss the issues and feature requests for the ReaderScope. Please do join.

ReaderScope 1.1.1 quick-n-easy features

In the last post I forgot to mention the new feature added - crash reporter. But thanks to the users who used this feature to report the crashes, I found a subtle problem. Also a couple of suggestions from comments in last post were pretty easy to implement on a Sunday afternoon. So I just released v1.1.1 with the fix for the Login crash, two features (zoom functionality, filtering read items) and a little internal optimization.

About the crash. I believe it was seen only by G1 users who have slide-out keyboards (not necessarily though). The G1 users have to slide out the keyboard to type in the credentials. This puts the app into landscape mode. After they press the login button, the query goes over network and a rotating progress dialog is shown. Depending upon the network, this may take some time. Before the login is complete and the progress dialog is gone, if the user slides in the keyboard (which is very natural), they force the app into portrait mode. By default the android platform restarts the activity during these orientation changes. This causes the original progress dialog to not belong to the current window. So when the login response returns and the app tries to cancel the progress dialog, it crashes. The solution I have put in v1.1.1 is to override the default behavior of android and make it not to restart the app. This will not make any visible change in the user interface, except that now the app won't crash even when you slide in the keyboard very quickly.

Now about the features. You will now see a filter icon on top of the list of news items (the 2nd screen). If you tap it, all your read items will get hidden. If you tap it again, they will be visible again.

Without filter:

With filter:

In addition, the news item now has zoom buttons to adjust the zoom.

I am not very satisfied with the icons themselves, will try to make them pretty in future release.

So give it a shot!

ReaderScope 1.1 - Social Beacons

Do you ever read a news story or a blog post in your RSS reader and wonder what other readers think about it? You can visit the web page and see what comments it has got. You can go to news ranking sites like Digg/Reddit and read the comments. You can peek into FriendFeed to see what people have to say about this story. But imagine doing that from a 320x480 screen of your android phone. ReaderScope v1.1 tries to make this social interaction easy for you with Social Beacons.

When you start reading a news item, ReaderScope scans Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed (silently in background) to check if they have this story listed. If it finds them, it will indicate respective beacon icons in the lower right hand corner of the news. If you like, you can tap on them and check the popularity scores and comments from these sites. You don't need to have any account with these services to use this feature (unless you want to rank the story or post a comment).

Of course if you don't bother about the social buzz of a news item, you can turn this feature off. Social Beacons are similar to action controls, you can uncheck them by going to Settings -> Action Controls.

If you like to use beacons only when you have right network or sufficient battery, you can set that too, under Settings -> Smart Settings.

This release also adds the functionality to read news by labels/tags - something requested by many. As a matter of fact, the functionality was always there. If you used any of beta versions, you would know. In 1.0, I moved to a hierarchical structure for feed list, that put a limitation on accessing news by labels. In this release however I found a way to get it working. Check out yourself.

There were also some improvements to avoid some memory leaks (reference leaks to be precise).

So give it a try!

ReaderScope 1.0.2 - making deep cache simple

As was rightly complained, the deep caching feature didn't seem to work in ReaderScope. It appeared so because a) If feed is not marked for periodic download, deep caching won't have any effect b) deep caching wasn't done for news items that were already downloaded. In 1.0.2 this is fixed.

If you choose a feed for deep caching by going to Settings, it will automatically be marked as favorite (i.e. marked for periodic download). If the feed has news items already downloaded (before setting deep caching), then those news items will also be deep cached at the time of next download. I hope this will make the deep caching feature more intuitive.

Note that you will be able to view the deep cached page by clicking on the 'Open Link' action button from panel. For deep-cached news items the web page will open inside the ReaderScope itself (instead of an external browser) and this will work even when you are offline.

Also note the performance implications of choosing feeds for deep cache. It will make your background downloads run longer and consume more memory and network. Imagine opening 20 webpages in the web browser one after the other (this is what happens in the background). So use deep caching with discretion.

Apart from this, there are few more improvements. There is a slight change/improvement in notifications. There are now three distinct icons to tell different notifications from each other.

- This icon in the status bar will indicate that a download is in progress.

- This icon will not linger after download is complete. You will see a "Done!" ticker when download finishes and the notification will vanish. I thought having it after its job is done was unnecessary. However, I liked a suggestion that there should be a way to know when the periodic download took place. That information now will be available in the logs. Just go to Settings->Logs and at the top you will find results of latest 10 downloads.

You will see this icon in the status bar when the periodic/manual download has failed for some reason - due to unsuitable/no network OR due to low battery, etc.

You will see this icon, for the actions (star/share/unread) that you perform offline and are pending. It signifies the actions that are pending upload.

In addition, the action buttons menu has been made even more non-intrusive. When you press "Menu" the actions menu shows up. Now it will get hidden when you touch the news item (you don't have to press "Menu" again).

I hope you like 1.0.2. Let me know.

ReaderScope 1.0.1

Update 2: Just released 1.0.1a. Upgrading to 1.0.1a from any previous version should cause crash. If you have already done a clean install of 1.0.1, then you don't have to upgrade to 1.0.1a, it has no new features, just the fix.

Update 1: Regarding the "Force-close" problem on upgrade from 1.0 to 1.0.1 - I see what the problem is, but don't understand why it is a problem, because I thought Android's package upgrade will handle it. It happens because of the changed layout of Action Panel. Apparently the upgrade process mixes the old and new layout files. Therefore a clean install of 1.0.1 solves the problem.

I am a long time Linux user. So when it comes to naming anything - files/images/tags - I don't use any white spaces in the name. It is a good practice IMO, but it made me forget that people can name their Google Reader tags with a space in the name. Moreover, Google Reader uses it as-is to form the UID. So none of my accounts exercised this test case. ReaderScope - as in 1.0 - neglects such labels and the others coming after it. That's probably the reason for two problems reported to me so far. Thanks to the gentleman who reported a bug this morning and more importantly generously provided his OPML file for testing. Now this bug should be fixed in 1.0.1.

If you were having any problems with missing feeds/labels, then you should upgrade to 1.0.1.

For troubleshooting this kind of problem, I am also introducing a logging facility in 1.0.1. I managed to put together a logging scheme that is accessible from the UI (Just go to Settings->Log). This screen shows a report of latest download and below that it will show key error messages that might have been incurred in background threads. If you see any problems in the behavior of ReaderScope, take a look at this screen. If you want me to look at it, just hit the "Menu" button and press email. The logs will be put in an email using the email client you have on phone, just send it to readerscope AT altcanvas DOT com. Also describe the problem you are facing.

Also 1.0.1 has some tiny but useful UI improvements. You can now favorite any feed from a short cut menu, while reading the feed.

The last improvement is the overlayed position of Action panel. It makes it less intrusive and more pretty.

So get your updates from android market OR slideme.org OR andappstore.com.

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!!!