See, this part in particular makes absolutely no sense. You see, NewsRack plugs into google reader. And the view is much better than the standard "mobile" Google Reader view you get on iPad, and it has several other advantages. First, I am able to keep my feeds in my exact desires order, as opposed to the alphabetical order. Additionally, I can tweet, save to Instapaper, save to Delicious, etc. in a very easy manner in the NewsRack app. Also, I'm almost positive that NewsRack will cache the stories in case I wanted to read offline (though I haven't had to use this yet).
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The Early Edition: My first iPad app (RSS with a difference)
- Thread starter Chuck
- Start date
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See, this part in particular makes absolutely no sense. You see, NewsRack plugs into google reader. And the view is much better than the standard "mobile" Google Reader view you get on iPad, and it has several other advantages. First, I am able to keep my feeds in my exact desires order, as opposed to the alphabetical order. Additionally, I can tweet, save to Instapaper, save to Delicious, etc. in a very easy manner in the NewsRack app. Also, I'm almost positive that NewsRack will cache the stories in case I wanted to read offline (though I haven't had to use this yet).
VirtualRain
macrumors 603
Unless I'm missing something... all I can conclude from this is that NewsRack has a simple and straightforward UI and that MyTimes has a sophisticated UI.
I'm more inclined to try Pulse after looking at both of these.
How do you purge the database or does it just keep piling up? I've got so many feeds that early edition just crashes at it's startup. I'm guessing it's due to the database being too large. Is there a solution?
I've come across the same problem and i have to delete the sql database in the early edition application folder via iFile
I've extensively tested Early Edition and i like it, with a great BUT
I've 200 RSS Feeds implemented cause i want to get rid of the 1 App for 1 datasource. That i have used on my iPhone several years now and i like the way to summarize several news sources in one app
But:
- The categorization isn't as practical as expected. I cannot create sub categories, so i can create a Main category eg "International" and make sub categories "U.S.", "Europe" and so on.
- The categories are not sortable, they get sorted according to the Description of the feed, so the news selection is kinda random if i select the category tab
- News retrieval is about "all or nothing" with 200 news sources i want to be able to select a category and only these feeds are updated.
- The application don't use the full potential of the landscape mode. In landscape mode half of the screen is filled with the categories and i can't disable this.
- App should be able to view videos if i select "View Source" and the original article with linked video content shows up
But in spite of the mentioned problems i like the app
I've 200 RSS Feeds implemented cause i want to get rid of the 1 App for 1 datasource. That i have used on my iPhone several years now and i like the way to summarize several news sources in one app
But:
- The categorization isn't as practical as expected. I cannot create sub categories, so i can create a Main category eg "International" and make sub categories "U.S.", "Europe" and so on.
- The categories are not sortable, they get sorted according to the Description of the feed, so the news selection is kinda random if i select the category tab
- News retrieval is about "all or nothing" with 200 news sources i want to be able to select a category and only these feeds are updated.
- The application don't use the full potential of the landscape mode. In landscape mode half of the screen is filled with the categories and i can't disable this.
- App should be able to view videos if i select "View Source" and the original article with linked video content shows up
But in spite of the mentioned problems i like the app
So many apps do this, including things like Apple's built in Mail app, and for me it's a big issue. When I'm looking at a competitive area with lots of app choices (e.g. RSS readers or Wikipedia browsers) then the ones that get deleted very quickly tend to be the ones that make this (in my opinion) mistake.
When I turn (*) my iPad into landscape mode it's because I want to get the full screen width for reading content (e.g. a feed or a Wikipedia article). If I want to get back to navigation then I'm happy to hit a button to get to the right screen. When I turn Safari into landscape mode it expands the page width for me, it doesn't feel the need to use the left third of the screen to show me my tab thumbnails or bookmarks folders.
I haven't got round to trying to select a newsreader yet but from browsing the app store Early Edition was looking to be a strong contender but this sort of landscape behaviour bugs me so much that I think it's just dropped off my list of apps to try. (I'm beginning to discover that $1 apps don't cost $1 and $5 apps don't cost $5. Because of the need to try out various competing apps to really discover the one that I like best a $1 app really ends up costing me at least $5 and, because I'm a bit more careful with the more expensive apps, a $5 app probably costs me more like $15 - $20.)
Chuck - you seem to have been less active in this thread recently. I hope things are still active with Early Edition; from what I've seen it deserves to be a success and I'd be interested in knowing whether the full-width landscape issue is likely to be addressed in a future version.
- Julian
(*) I say "turn my iPad into landscape mode" but I actually try to keep it locked into landscape as much as I can, it's just the occasional game or legacy iPhone app running in compatibility mode mode that ever causes me to go portrait.
Well, like I said in my last post, I haven't started evaluating news readers yet, it's still on my list to do. (I'm in the UK so I've only had my iPad for a week). A specific example I had in mind with Wikipedia readers though, which is an app area where I have looked at various alternatives, are either Articles or Wiki^2 (or Wiki squared if you prefer); both these show the article in full width whereas others, including the best selling one whose name I can't remember but it has a "W" logo on a sort of bronze coloured background, insists on displaying the content/section index on the left when in landscape mode. Another example from a different part of the app world is mail readers where I really tried to like the Mail app and use it to read my Gmail but what I hated was that I could never get a full width reading window in landscape mode. I haven't found a real solution to this one yet so for email the best I've got to is to read my Gmail in my browser (iCab) and set the user agent to a desktop browser and force the Gmail mode to standard desktop so that I get most of the width for the email messages when I read them.superflush said:
Sorry I can't give you any specific examples regarding rss readers, and sorry if my previous post was misleading in implying that I could - that wasn't my intention.
- Julian
The bestselling Wikipedia app you are thinking of is probably Wikipanion. That's the one I have and I like it a lot. It does have the navigational pane in landscape.
Oh thats fine. I just was curious if there were any recommended apps that give you full screen landscape.
I do like the navigational pane when it is useful in landscape.
I think it only becomes a problem when you don't have an option to go into full screen. Apps that have the navigational pane, but that still let you go into full screen (like Instapaper does when you view an article) are definitely good with me.
CristobalHuet
macrumors 65816
Tested this and decided to drop $5 on it.
A fresh, new concept. Kudos to you for taking the usual (newspaper) and making it into something extraordinary.
Granted, the app is not perfect, and I have one MAJOR qualm with it that has been voiced here before:
PLEASE give us a way to categorize our categories. I don't necessarily want my "food" section to be popping up on the cover of the Early Edition, but I'd rather have the "tech" section there, per se.
It's not that big of a deal right now and I appreciate the fact you are actively developing, but I certainly hope you'll implement a way for us to pick what's the most important categories to us, to prioritize them.
A few other notes (been said before, but saying again):
- load times...a little too slow. I get that it needs to be organized, but surely there must be a way to speed it up a bit.
- back/forward buttons...when opening an individual article and clicking on a link from that article, it takes you to another page, but there is no way to get back to the article itself. A way to navigate back to the article where the link was would be great.
- some themes, perhaps? 🙂
- elimination of duplicate stories: some blogs (MacRumors, BGR, Engadget) post similar news stories (say...Bill Gates hired by Apple, lol)...I would get that story 3 different times, yet each article is pretty much the same. A way for the app to perhaps scope out similar stories and remove them (keeping the most "popular" one, perhaps, the one with the most comments...) would be great too.
All in a all, terrific work. I ditched Pulse for this.
A fresh, new concept. Kudos to you for taking the usual (newspaper) and making it into something extraordinary.
Granted, the app is not perfect, and I have one MAJOR qualm with it that has been voiced here before:
PLEASE give us a way to categorize our categories. I don't necessarily want my "food" section to be popping up on the cover of the Early Edition, but I'd rather have the "tech" section there, per se.
It's not that big of a deal right now and I appreciate the fact you are actively developing, but I certainly hope you'll implement a way for us to pick what's the most important categories to us, to prioritize them.
A few other notes (been said before, but saying again):
- load times...a little too slow. I get that it needs to be organized, but surely there must be a way to speed it up a bit.
- back/forward buttons...when opening an individual article and clicking on a link from that article, it takes you to another page, but there is no way to get back to the article itself. A way to navigate back to the article where the link was would be great.
- some themes, perhaps? 🙂
- elimination of duplicate stories: some blogs (MacRumors, BGR, Engadget) post similar news stories (say...Bill Gates hired by Apple, lol)...I would get that story 3 different times, yet each article is pretty much the same. A way for the app to perhaps scope out similar stories and remove them (keeping the most "popular" one, perhaps, the one with the most comments...) would be great too.
All in a all, terrific work. I ditched Pulse for this.
Can you explalin the process of doing this? The only thing I was able to do is delete the whole application and re-install.
Sure!
Use SBSettings to find out where Early Edition is saved (More Button / App Folders - look for Early Edition).
Mine begins with: F29450022-B807 didn't know if it is the same on your side.
Go into iFile and locate /mobile/Applications/<Found ID>
Open Folder go into Documents Folder and delete FeedStore.db
Best regards
mamema
I had a quick play with this last night, but I couldn't see a way to have articles from the feeds appear in chronological order? It seemed to be putting them in groups by feed.
*sigh* I just typed a huge reply to this thread and it all disappeared when I hit submit. Here goes again!!!
First off, I'm really sorry for dropping off the radar here. It wasn't intentional and I didn't realise there'd been so many responses. :/
To create a category, tap the + button, then select "Add a news section", where you can give it a name and choose the feeds you'd like inside it. Don't worry if you don't get it right first time though, you can always reorganise things by tapping the Edit button, then choosing either a section or feed to modify feeds within sections or sections for feeds. (BTW, some customers haven't realised but the triangular arrow to the right of a section name will show/hide the feeds within it).
Thanks for this feedback. Whilst we have nothing against syncing with Google, we see The Early Edition as more of a standalone casual reading app, as opposed to a Google Reader client, which is aimed more at power users. Having said that, we're not ruling out sync for a future update. But the primary reason we added GR feed and folder importing was to give users a fast way of setting up the app with feeds.
Hopefully you're enjoying version 1.2 which was recently released? This update is much faster at fetching and has removed the yellow feedback sticky note. But as for the layout of articles, it's entirely chronological by post date (however if an article has no timestamp it will appear at the end of the paper).
Again, this was fixed in 1.2. Or are you still experiencing this? Please let us know if you are.
You can't purge the database at present, but the crashing/instability as a database grows has been addressed in 1.2 and you should be having a much smoother and faster experience now.
Thanks for sharing your feedback. 🙂
Again, sorry for dropping off the radar, it was intentional.
Thanks for this feedback. Hopefully you'll be happier with 1.2 now that load times are much faster and there are back/forward buttons when you navigate away from the story you were originally reading in webview.
They are actually chronological, but as I said earlier articles that have no timestamp appear at the end of the paper. You can test this by tapping an article and seeing the post time/date just under the headline.
---
Thanks for the responses everyone! We've been really busy with iOS4 and the iPhone 4 releases so if you don't see too much from us straight away don't give up on us. There's some really cool stuff coming. 🙂
First off, I'm really sorry for dropping off the radar here. It wasn't intentional and I didn't realise there'd been so many responses. :/
To create a category, tap the + button, then select "Add a news section", where you can give it a name and choose the feeds you'd like inside it. Don't worry if you don't get it right first time though, you can always reorganise things by tapping the Edit button, then choosing either a section or feed to modify feeds within sections or sections for feeds. (BTW, some customers haven't realised but the triangular arrow to the right of a section name will show/hide the feeds within it).
Thanks for this feedback. Whilst we have nothing against syncing with Google, we see The Early Edition as more of a standalone casual reading app, as opposed to a Google Reader client, which is aimed more at power users. Having said that, we're not ruling out sync for a future update. But the primary reason we added GR feed and folder importing was to give users a fast way of setting up the app with feeds.
Hopefully you're enjoying version 1.2 which was recently released? This update is much faster at fetching and has removed the yellow feedback sticky note. But as for the layout of articles, it's entirely chronological by post date (however if an article has no timestamp it will appear at the end of the paper).
Again, this was fixed in 1.2. Or are you still experiencing this? Please let us know if you are.
You can't purge the database at present, but the crashing/instability as a database grows has been addressed in 1.2 and you should be having a much smoother and faster experience now.
Thanks for sharing your feedback. 🙂
Again, sorry for dropping off the radar, it was intentional.
Thanks for this feedback. Hopefully you'll be happier with 1.2 now that load times are much faster and there are back/forward buttons when you navigate away from the story you were originally reading in webview.
They are actually chronological, but as I said earlier articles that have no timestamp appear at the end of the paper. You can test this by tapping an article and seeing the post time/date just under the headline.
---
Thanks for the responses everyone! We've been really busy with iOS4 and the iPhone 4 releases so if you don't see too much from us straight away don't give up on us. There's some really cool stuff coming. 🙂
Had another play with it last night and the order of the articles was much better, seems much better to read now 🙂
Pleased with the app, look forward to any updates you'll be making.
Pleased with the app, look forward to any updates you'll be making.
Southern Dad
macrumors 68000
I'm in the newspaper industry and read many papers each day. However like many I'm not a fan of all the advertising and tend to skip over most of it (Please don't tell the ad directorni said that part). This program gives me a neat way to quickly view the headlines and read only the stories I am interested in without getting ink on my fingertips.
lacker
macrumors member
After reading the efforts you have been putting in to improve speed and features, I decided to get the app. I was originally deciding between this or Pulse and well you got me. But just some things I don't like about it,
-All pages are in the same format, there isn't any new layout (might be wrong so correct me if I am)
-Speed & Performance of mostly the flipping of pages might need a improvement.
That's all for now but kudos on the effort on the newspaper like idea of an rss reader and looking forward to you future updates my friend. 😎
-All pages are in the same format, there isn't any new layout (might be wrong so correct me if I am)
-Speed & Performance of mostly the flipping of pages might need a improvement.
That's all for now but kudos on the effort on the newspaper like idea of an rss reader and looking forward to you future updates my friend. 😎
I like this App very much. I love the idea of putting all kinds of RSS feeds in one list and creating a personal paper.
Thanks guys. We're planning on more features this year but we've got another project to work on too, so thanks in advance for your patience. 🙂
(there are only two of us).
(there are only two of us).