Any App Like Pulse?

[simmepi]

Looks like Apple broke the ability to swipe back to thumbnails from a full article. :/

They also broke RSS On Watch, a Watch app that I used to browse feeds. Sure would love a synced copy of Heartfeed on my wrist, escpecially if I get the new larger watch.

Hi!

Swiping back functionality should still work (on both iOS 11 & 12), but there is a caveat on iPad. After introducing a new preview window on iPad which "hovers" above the thumbnails, swiping back worked in one place but not another:

• If you read the standard way, i.e. click on thumbnail -> see hovering preview window -> click to read on the web -> read full article, swiping back from full view to "hovering" preview window did not work. This is because of the way the full article view works (this is really Safari baked into the app) which is only allowing swipe back if you swipe back to a fullscreen window. So with the new preview window being smaller than fullscreen, no swiping back.
• If you instead jump directly from thumbnails to full article, either by long-pressing the thumbnail or by having preference set to reverse normal click & long-press, you can swipe back since the thumbnail view is fullscreen.

On iPhone there is no "hovering" preview so swiping back should always work.

I myself really like the hovering preview, both aesthetically and functionally (being able to click on a thumbnail behind the preview to dismiss it I think works better than swiping back). But some users really preferred being able to swipe back on an iPad, always, so I introduced a setting to enable the preview window to always go fullscreen on iPads (i.e. the old way), so now one can choose which to have.

Personally, I would like to have swipe back functionality to the hovering preview, but as mentioned, so far no luck with that for me. But I think it should be possible to code around but so far my attempts have failed. Darn.

Hope this clears things up. If not, or if swiping back does not work for you as expected, please get back to me.

As for Apple Watch, I'm still interested but still hold back, both by time constraints (although I hope to get more time for Heartfeed soon) but mostly due to me not owning one since I'm not a watch person, and I think trying to make a good watch app without being able to test it on actual hardware would be stupid. So we'll see what happens

 

[Redneck1089]

Thanks! I use it a lot myself, probably more than any other app, so I try to make it as nice as possible. Sometimes I do experiment a bit with the interface, like in the latest version where I changed how the preview window is shown when you use an iPad. So far mixed feedback on that change, but since I personally like it a lot more than the older one, the new one will remain, but if there is a lot of negative feedback from iPad users I will instead add a setting for the look. I prefer to keep the number of settings down, but if I like something a lot but users don't, I'll have to compromise

And sometimes I just add things since it is fun to try out new functionality. The latest such thing is that I've added a lot of keyboard shortcuts for those (I assume very few) users who have a hardware keyboard connected to their iOS device. It was simple to add them and it was fun, and since I sometimes do use a hardware keyboard with one of my iPads, I actually use it myself. It's not yet where you can drive the app 100% using the keyboard, but I'm getting there I think.

Convinced my friendly yesterday to buy your app. He asked what it was I was using, so I showed him. I told him it's the best RRS reader out there, and within a few minutes of him using it he agreed.

Please keep up the good work!

 

[pacorob]

Could you check why the feed from http://www.gumstarr.com/ doesn't show images in Heartfeed? I've tested it in Feedly and there the images with every blog post do work.

 

[GIZBUG]

Thanks! I use it a lot myself, probably more than any other app, so I try to make it as nice as possible. Sometimes I do experiment a bit with the interface, like in the latest version where I changed how the preview window is shown when you use an iPad. So far mixed feedback on that change, but since I personally like it a lot more than the older one, the new one will remain, but if there is a lot of negative feedback from iPad users I will instead add a setting for the look. I prefer to keep the number of settings down, but if I like something a lot but users don't, I'll have to compromise

And sometimes I just add things since it is fun to try out new functionality. The latest such thing is that I've added a lot of keyboard shortcuts for those (I assume very few) users who have a hardware keyboard connected to their iOS device. It was simple to add them and it was fun, and since I sometimes do use a hardware keyboard with one of my iPads, I actually use it myself. It's not yet where you can drive the app 100% using the keyboard, but I'm getting there I think.

Does your app support FULL article downloads for offline reading? Reeder and Unread that I own do not.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Does your app support FULL article downloads for offline reading? Reeder and Unread that I own do not.

It doesn’t support full download for offline. Newsify does.

 

[GIZBUG]

It doesn’t support full download for offline. Newsify does.

Thanks, will look into that app...

 

[simmepi]

Could you check why the feed from http://www.gumstarr.com/ doesn't show images in Heartfeed? I've tested it in Feedly and there the images with every blog post do work.

I'm afraid it is just that Gumstarr doesn't provide an image to go with each article in the feed. I checked the raw RSS and there is nothing but the title, some custom categories, and the text for the articles.

Feedly solves this by actually downloading the full article for all feeds subscribed through them, and then parsing the article for images which are then provided to your reader. So this requires some server support, plus you downloading the feed content from Feedly rather than directly from the source. And since Heartfeed does not use any server-side support (i.e. everything is run directly from your app to the feed sources themselves), this solution isn't possible. In theory I could do the same thing on your device, but that would require an awful lot of bandwidth & CPU usage since every refresh would require all webpages for all articles to be downloaded in full, which would make the interface really laggy.

So unfortunately, this is a drawback with the client-only solution in Heartfeed I'm afraid.
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Does your app support FULL article downloads for offline reading? Reeder and Unread that I own do not.

As already mentioned by other helpful users, no such support in Heartfeed. I can mention that I've toyed with a small thing which would make this possible but only by going through the Safari app: I could add a way to save articles to Safari's reading list. Since the reading list is cached for offline use, this would solve the problem. But since this would mean having to switch to Safari for the actual reading, I think it would be too inelegant for practical use.

 

[pacorob]

I'm afraid it is just that Gumstarr doesn't provide an image to go with each article in the feed. I checked the raw RSS and there is nothing but the title, some custom categories, and the text for the articles.

Feedly solves this by actually downloading the full article for all feeds subscribed through them, and then parsing the article for images which are then provided to your reader. So this requires some server support, plus you downloading the feed content from Feedly rather than directly from the source. And since Heartfeed does not use any server-side support (i.e. everything is run directly from your app to the feed sources themselves), this solution isn't possible. In theory I could do the same thing on your device, but that would require an awful lot of bandwidth & CPU usage since every refresh would require all webpages for all articles to be downloaded in full, which would make the interface really laggy.

So unfortunately, this is a drawback with the client-only solution in Heartfeed I'm afraid.

Thank you for looking into this matter! I really appreciate it. I get the problem then with this feed. It's unfortunate. Not sure if the website uses somesort of standard like software (like Wordpress) where it would be just a setting to tick on or off so this is added to the RSS feed. I could reach out to the owner of the website.