Any App Like Pulse?

[sford56]

I'll chime in and say great update, Heartfeed has now replaced Newsify as my daily RSS app.

Just a few things to make it better now:

1. I know the size of the ribbons has been discussed above, however, my issue is that the boxes are too small on my ipad pro. I'd rather see larger text and images (maybe I'm getting old ) with the larger screen area. I understand the size on a regular size ipad, but would be very nice to at least have a setting for maybe 3 different sizes. I know you don't like adding settings, but there should be some amount of customization.

2. Scrolling is not super smooth, even on my iPad Pro. When scrolling top to bottom, it is a little jerky. minor item, but I'll mention it.

3. I'm not sure of the mechanics behind the photos, but some major feeds, like Reuters don't show the lead photos, even though the articles include them. Also, specifically with Reuters, for some articles it is pulling advertisement photos that have nothing to do with the article.

4. Would like to see full article text within the app for paid users. Would prefer to be able to read the whole article without going to the full web view, with a second tap.

5. Minor UI issue: the swipe to return gesture works from the in-app screen, but you have to tap the "done" button if you go to web view. Would prefer for the swipe to return to be pervasive.

 

[pacorob]

I'll chime in and say great update, Heartfeed has now replaced Newsify as my daily RSS app.

Just a few things to make it better now:

4. Would like to see full article text within the app for paid users. Would prefer to be able to read the whole article without going to the full web view, with a second tap.

I would also love to have that if it's possible.

 

[simmepi]

I'll chime in and say great update, Heartfeed has now replaced Newsify as my daily RSS app.

Just a few things to make it better now:

1. I know the size of the ribbons has been discussed above, however, my issue is that the boxes are too small on my ipad pro. I'd rather see larger text and images (maybe I'm getting old ) with the larger screen area. I understand the size on a regular size ipad, but would be very nice to at least have a setting for maybe 3 different sizes. I know you don't like adding settings, but there should be some amount of customization.

2. Scrolling is not super smooth, even on my iPad Pro. When scrolling top to bottom, it is a little jerky. minor item, but I'll mention it.

3. I'm not sure of the mechanics behind the photos, but some major feeds, like Reuters don't show the lead photos, even though the articles include them. Also, specifically with Reuters, for some articles it is pulling advertisement photos that have nothing to do with the article.

4. Would like to see full article text within the app for paid users. Would prefer to be able to read the whole article without going to the full web view, with a second tap.

5. Minor UI issue: the swipe to return gesture works from the in-app screen, but you have to tap the "done" button if you go to web view. Would prefer for the swipe to return to be pervasive.

Glad you like it, and thanks for the feedback!

1. Yep, this one is tough, and I suspect it will sooner or later have to be a setting of some kind. I can also mention that I'm thinking about doing some special layout for iPad Pro, maybe with the main view (the "boxes") show to the left and the viewer or full web view to the right. On the large Pro the screen gets pretty cluttered with all the boxes

2. True as well. I'm trying to make this smoother but it seems as if this is not really related to CPU speed or anything (it is the same on all devices I test, no matter the CPU), but simply caused by the way table views and collection views (these views are standard views provided by iOS) work together on iOS. You can see that the jerk happens when a new feed appears when you scroll. Should be possible to get around, somehow, but apparently not trivial. As you say, not important for actual usage, but a bit annoying.

3. Photos I'm trying to improve; next update should include photos for more news items. The way I decide which photo to show is fairly simple: In the reader view (the view you see when you select a news item), I check for photos, and the first photo found which is large enough (really small images are often used for ad tracking purposes), I use. This is almost always good because pure real ad images are normally not part of the content shown in the reader view. I'll look at Reuters to see what they are doing.

4. Somewhat connected to 3, actually. The way RSS feeds work is that a feed contains a list of items, and each item has a textual content (potentially include links to images). These items' contents are what you see when clicking a news item, so what you actually see there is decided by this content (and if there is any image, it is used in the preview/thumbnail). Getting the full text, if it is not already included (some feeds include the full text, some don't), would mean having to actually open the full web view in the background, and then from that try to find the full text. Doable, but slow, and quite difficult to get right. Those apps which tries to display the full text normally do so by having a server part to the app, where the server downloads the full web view and then tries to get the full text, and the app then downloads this text from the actual server. Heartfeed does not have a server part so that is not possible, and finding the full text is actually really difficult (and for some feeds they explicitly say that you are not allowed to this, as well, or they only provide the full text feed to paying subscribers). So I'm afraid this is not something which will change in Heartfeed, at least for the foreseeable future.

5. The way you want it to work is actually how it worked originally. However, it turned out that in some cases swiping back from the in-app browser sometimes crashed Heartfeed. Investigating, I found that this is a bug with the in-app browser iOS functionality (for those interested it is discussed here: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/29048), and everyone hitting it has come up with the same workaround: Disable the swipe gesture. So unfortunately, nothing I can do at the moment but I'm keeping track of the bug and I hope Apple fixes it.

 

[sford56]

Thanks Simmepi, and like I say...all of that stuff is pretty minor at this point. Just very happy to have my ribbon interface back

I don't suppose there is a way to force the full web view to follow the color scheme of the app? i.e. dark them. It's pretty jarring to be reading at night (trying not to wake my wife) and have a bright white background pop up when I click to read an article. I'm guessing this is not possible, as it's an issue with all of the readers I have found, but I thought I'd ask. Hopefully night-shift in 9.3 will help with this.

Oh, and for the record...I like the orange text on black background.

Here's what Reuters is doing, if it helps.

 

[simmepi]

Thanks Simmepi, and like I say...all of that stuff is pretty minor at this point. Just very happy to have my ribbon interface back

I don't suppose there is a way to force the full web view to follow the color scheme of the app? i.e. dark them. It's pretty jarring to be reading at night (trying not to wake my wife) and have a bright white background pop up when I click to read an article. I'm guessing this is not possible, as it's an issue with all of the readers I have found, but I thought I'd ask. Hopefully night-shift in 9.3 will help with this.

Oh, and for the record...I like the orange text on black background.

Here's what Reuters is doing, if it helps.

View attachment 621390

Unfortunately, there is no way to get the full web view to change color scheme: In reality, I can do exactly nothing with this view, apart from opening it with the clicked URL. This is because it is really "Safari running in-app", so Apple has made sure that the app developer cannot interact with the view in any way, to prevent naughty apps from seeing what you are doing on the web, recording keyboard entries, etc.

And stupid Reuters! This is the first feed I've come across which actually uses ad images in the news item's context; a big no-no considering how feeds are supposed to work. Not sure I can prevent it but I'll have a look, for sure!

And I also like the orange-on-black look

 

[mcdj]

Great to see another update.

Sadly, I'm still seeing no thumbnails in the New York Times feed, and CNN is a mix of mostly no thumbnails and ads.

Would also like to second the request to be able to refresh one feed at a time by swiping by right.

Keep up the great work!

 

[simmepi]

Great to see another update.

Sadly, I'm still seeing no thumbnails in the New York Times feed, and CNN is a mix of mostly no thumbnails and ads.

Would also like to second the request to be able to refresh one feed at a time by swiping by right.

Keep up the great work!

Glad you like the app!

New York Times: Yeah, I also have NYT among my feeds and unfortunately they do not include images in the news items in the feed :-/ So, the only way to get thumbnails for NYT would be to download the actual normal web page in the background, and then trying to parse it to get the image . This is something which I don't do right now; the reasons are similar to the ones in my previous comment about getting the full news text when it is not included in the feed. I.e. bandwidth usage would go way up, it would be slow (imagine opening all the web pages for every news item in all your feeds), and also quite hard to get right. So the only reasonable way to do it would be to add a server part ot Heartfeed, where you have an account and the server instead does this heavy lifting and then serves it to the app. So I'm afraid this is not going to happen in the near future, at least.

And the single feed refresh I am looking into

 

[pacorob]

Have you guys also noticed that the Yomu app got a major 2.0 update which can compete again with Heartfeed. The UI is pretty slick. I do think that it should offer an in-app purchase to remove the banner. I also had an issues showing one of my feeds from Emerce.

What has been updated for Yomu:
add
* landscape mode.
* gif image support.
* cell long press webview.
* direct rss url input.
* webview page controller.
* open in safari share action.

fix
* ios9 optimize.
* image load speed.

 

[sford56]

Heartfeed was updated last night, and it looks great. you can now re-size the ribbons larger or smaller with a slider, which is really slick because you can set it to the exact size you want. Thanks Simmepi!

 

[mildocjr]

I used Google Reader and pulse exclusively then went to flipboard up until I found Zite which had a cleaner interface, after that Zite got bought out by Flipboard and they've shut the service down to the best of my knowledge. Around this time pulse got bought by LinkedIn and completely ruined the newsfeed and I ended up jumping ship to Apple News which so far has been treating me pretty good, it's not as good as Zite and Flipboard, but it is better in readability and cleanliness IMO.

 

[pacorob]

Heartfeed was updated last night, and it looks great. you can now re-size the ribbons larger or smaller with a slider, which is really slick because you can set it to the exact size you want. Thanks Simmepi!

It's indeed another great update.
My wishes for now are:
- reduce space between header (Default group / settings) and first feed
- UI for showing feeds could be more polished
- Would love to have the option when you re-size the ribbons to a smaller size to also choose to reduce the text size so you still can read the full article title e.g. 'EU court says linking to copyrighted material isn't illegal' instead of e.g. 'EU court says linking to'
- Increase size/same font as in rest of app when you search for feeds
- Sharing feature doesn't show the title
- Option to choose to remove the person who wrote an article from the feed overview

I used Google Reader and pulse exclusively then went to flipboard up until I found Zite which had a cleaner interface, after that Zite got bought out by Flipboard and they've shut the service down to the best of my knowledge. Around this time pulse got bought by LinkedIn and completely ruined the newsfeed and I ended up jumping ship to Apple News which so far has been treating me pretty good, it's not as good as Zite and Flipboard, but it is better in readability and cleanliness IMO.

Have you read the conversation here? Why not try Heartfeed or Yomu to get the good old look/feel of Pulse News. The up/downside of the two apps are:

Heartfeed:
+ in-app purchase to unlock limit of feeds
+ no ads
- reduce space between header (Default group / settings) and first feed
- Would love to have the option when you re-size the ribbons to a smaller size to also choose to reduce the text size so you still can read the full article title e.g. 'EU court says linking to copyrighted material isn't illegal' instead of e.g. 'EU court says linking to'
- UI for showing feeds could be more polished
- Increase size/same font as in rest of app when you search for feeds
- Sharing feature doesn't show the title
- Option to choose to remove the person who wrote an article from the feed overview

Yomu:
+ nice UI
- lacks option to remove the ads
- share feature is buggy, in most cases causes the app to crash
- when you press the home button shows odd dots on all images of the feeds

 

[mcdj]

Glad you like the app!

New York Times: Yeah, I also have NYT among my feeds and unfortunately they do not include images in the news items in the feed :-/ So, the only way to get thumbnails for NYT would be to download the actual normal web page in the background, and then trying to parse it to get the image . This is something which I don't do right now; the reasons are similar to the ones in my previous comment about getting the full news text when it is not included in the feed. I.e. bandwidth usage would go way up, it would be slow (imagine opening all the web pages for every news item in all your feeds), and also quite hard to get right. So the only reasonable way to do it would be to add a server part ot Heartfeed, where you have an account and the server instead does this heavy lifting and then serves it to the app. So I'm afraid this is not going to happen in the near future, at least.

And the single feed refresh I am looking into

Another great update! Keep up the good work.

Would love to see some kind of loading animation or icon when refreshing a single feed...kinda hard to tell it's doing anything.

Still hoping to see a lighter cleaner story page. Night view is great for thumbs, not so great for the story view.

As for the NY Times, I wonder if this is helpful... In Firefox, you can view an RSS feed directly in the browser. When I use this URL, http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml, in Firefox, below each story, there is 1 text link to a "media file", and if you click that text link, it's the same thumbnail you'd expect to see for the given story. I wonder if theres a way to parse that media link into your code without having to load the entire HTML doc. I also wonder if there's not some hidden RSS feed out there that somehow does show the photos in-line.

 

[sford56]

After using the updated app for a few days, there is one other minor thing I have noticed that I would like to see changed:
When you make the boxes bigger, the text size stays the same, which is fine, but it aligns to the top of the black box, and the black box gets taller when you increase the size. I would like the black box to get smaller as the overall photo box gets bigger, so that I can see more of the photo.
Right now, with the size I have mine set to, I get 2 to 3 lines of empty space below the article title, and the black box always covers ~1/3 of the photo.

 

[simmepi]

After using the updated app for a few days, there is one other minor thing I have noticed that I would like to see changed:
When you make the boxes bigger, the text size stays the same, which is fine, but it aligns to the top of the black box, and the black box gets taller when you increase the size. I would like the black box to get smaller as the overall photo box gets bigger, so that I can see more of the photo.
Right now, with the size I have mine set to, I get 2 to 3 lines of empty space below the article title, and the black box always covers ~1/3 of the photo.

Yep, right now the text box stays the same relative size (can't check right now but I think 37% of the total box height), and I should probably change it slightly, like slowly decreasing the relative height; for big boxes the text area is definitely unnecessarily large.
[doublepost=1462107821][/doublepost]

Another great update! Keep up the good work.

Would love to see some kind of loading animation or icon when refreshing a single feed...kinda hard to tell it's doing anything.

Still hoping to see a lighter cleaner story page. Night view is great for thumbs, not so great for the story view.

As for the NY Times, I wonder if this is helpful... In Firefox, you can view an RSS feed directly in the browser. When I use this URL, http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml, in Firefox, below each story, there is 1 text link to a "media file", and if you click that text link, it's the same thumbnail you'd expect to see for the given story. I wonder if theres a way to parse that media link into your code without having to load the entire HTML doc. I also wonder if there's not some hidden RSS feed out there that somehow does show the photos in-line.

Sorry,for some reason I stopped getting notifications for this thread, so answer is late.

Anyhow, leading animation is now in place,as you've probably seen.

As för NYT, I do check for the standard way of indicating a media file for each story, so it should be picked up. But testing NYT again I see that it isn't, so I'll have to check when at my computer what is going on here. Hopefully it'll be something simple to support

 

[max2]

Why do not all RSS feeds have images for ever article ? Anyway to fix this ?

 

[simmepi]

Why do not all RSS feeds have images for ever article ? Anyway to fix this ?

It simply depends on the source of the RSS feed : Some include image(s), some don't. And if they don't, there is no simple way to try to find one in other ways; the app would have download the complete web page in the background and then "guess" if any of the images on it is good (including ad images etc). Plus, this would mean that refreshing a feed might result in tens or even hundreds of MB needing to be downloaded.

 

[barbu]

downloaded and paid for Heartfeed. Great job, I look forward to seeing refinements but for now, this is pretty sweet. Thank you so much for stepping up to fill in the void that Pulse left.

 

[barbu]

so having used Hearted for a day, i thought i'd toss in my 2 cents:

- i love the safari view since it lets me use my blocker app and 1password extensions. But it is tedious to get out of (exposing the controls, then hitting the Done button). Is it possible to dismiss the safari view with a back swipe?
- I find the article reader view text is a little to large, I hope you can add options for font sizes.
- the headers in the grid view could be made thinner to make more room for content.

Keep up the good work

 

[pacorob]

I still use my Heartfeed app daily on both iPad (mini 2) and iPhone and love it (iCloud sync is really nice when you add a website on one iDevice to see it also on the other).
I do still wish that you have a good share feature for Facebook and especially Twitter to share the name of the article when you want to post something. Like other RSS apps do.

 

[simmepi]

I still use my Heartfeed app daily on both iPad (mini 2) and iPhone and love it but would love it (iCloud sync is really nice when you add a website on one iDevice to see it also on the other).
I do still wish that you have an good share feature for Facebook and especially Twitter to share the name of the article when you want to post something. Like other RSS apps do.

Glad you use the app and like it!
As for sharing, I'll look into how to add the title when sharing using Twitter; right now I'm simply using the iOS-supported Twitter sharing pane, with no custom code, and I suspect I need to add some code of my own to be able to also add the article title. No promises, but will definitely look into it. I will anyhow have to do some small changes to the current sharing support due to a new feature I'm thinking of adding.
[doublepost=1467052040][/doublepost]

so having used Hearted for a day, i thought i'd toss in my 2 cents:

- i love the safari view since it lets me use my blocker app and 1password extensions. But it is tedious to get out of (exposing the controls, then hitting the Done button). Is it possible to dismiss the safari view with a back swipe?
- I find the article reader view text is a little to large, I hope you can add options for font sizes.
- the headers in the grid view could be made thinner to make more room for content.

Keep up the good work

- I completely agree with you. In a really early version it worked like you want it to (and how I also would want it to), but unfortunately some users ran into a bug in iOS, for the Safari view, and Apple still has not fixed it. I haven't been able to test it in iOS 10 yet but will do so, and if it is fixed I'll definitely re-add this behaviour. The bug was pretty nasty, resulting in having to force-quit Heartfeed, and it's discussed here by some other app developers, if you are interested (the only workaround anyone has come up with so far is to do what I do, i.e. disable the back swipe): https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/29048
- Not impossible. I try to not have too many options since it can be overwhelming, but I am tweaking these things continuously, and I do have a little bit more space for settings now (last version removed some which were no longer necessary).
- Yep, agree, I'd like to remove a few millimeters there, but this one is a bit more difficult than it might appear. When the spacing is decreased, unfortunately the text can be clipped in a nasty way in certain situations (like the title being longer than 1 line) due to this particular table view having some built-in spacing. So possible, if I come up with a nice way to do it, not causing bad clipping.

Thanks for the kind words And for the feedback!

 

[Cougarcat]

I will keep an eye on Heartfeed, but I can't use it because the awful hyphenating in articles makes them unreadable for me.

 

[simmepi]

I will keep an eye on Heartfeed, but I can't use it because the awful hyphenating in articles makes them unreadable for me.

Interesting; can you give me the feed address? There should really be no special hyphenating in the articles, at least I do not add any, but it might be that the html code in the feed has some unusual setting.
Also, what iOS device are you using, and do you have any special setting like accessibility zooming or some such?

 

[Cougarcat]

Interesting; can you give me the feed address? There should really be no special hyphenating in the articles, at least I do not add any, but it might be that the html code in the feed has some unusual setting.
Also, what iOS device are you using, and do you have any special setting like accessibility zooming or some such?

It happens with any feed on my 6 Plus. I don't have any special settings on.

 

[simmepi]

It happens with any feed on my 6 Plus. I don't have any special settings on.

Even weirder, that's the same phone I normally use. Can you post a screenshot so I can see what you're seeing? Only if you have the time, of course!

 

[Cougarcat]

Even weirder, that's the same phone I normally use. Can you post a screenshot so I can see what you're seeing? Only if you have the time, of course!