On another note I’m happy to announce the inclusion of four new translations:

• Russian by Filip Dunsky — спасибо!
• Czech by Zutro — díky!
• Swedish by Tommy — tack!
• Portuguese by Alexandre Flávio — obrigado!

Even better, Denis Talala has pimped my pathetic programmer-artish splash screen and enhanced the icon to fit better with the iPhone Look^TM. Waiting for the app to start up has never been sweeter

By the way, at the time of me writing this, Feeds has just hit 70,000 official downloads!

Since the last release, Feeds brushed up its language skills and now contains four additional translations. This means you can already enjoy Feeds in a total of seven languages. Many thanks go out to the translators, who are:

Antonio Soler (Spanish)
Kyosuke Takayama (Japanese)
Fabio Mosetti (Italian)
Jerry Lee (Traditional Chinese)
Jay Sun (Chinese)

I also fixed a few things here and there and added a simplistic ‘Star’ button, so you can easily keep track of those special entries that you want to read again on a bigger screen free of finger smudges. This is probably going to be the last update for the next few weeks though, as next week my endterms begin. Damnit, Chloe.

For those who can’t wait and don’t fear scp, I uploaded the archive to my server.

Update 05/15/2008: If it’s not working for you, please let me know:

• What language your iPhone is set to
• Whether it works when you set your iPhone to English

Update 05/16/2008: Feed 0.4.0 is out now.

• You can now comfortably browse through all of a feed’s entries by pressing the previous / next buttons.
  
  
  
• Marking all of a feed’s entries as read now is as easy as tapping the “Read all”-button
• The entry list now sports nice summaries which make it a lot more comfortable to skim through a blog
  

Three weeks and over 15,000 downloads after its initial public release, it is time for Feeds 0.3! It will be available through the ModMyiFone.com repository in the next few hours days. Although it was planned as a bug fix release, one or two new features still managed to sneak their way in:

Changelist

• Feeds now contains language files for Chinese (thanks to Jay Sun!) and German. If you would like to use the application in your native language and have the impression that you can do better than Babelfish at providing the necessary translations, please contact me.
• Introduced the category view that allows you to filter your feeds by category and to hide items you’ve already read.
• You can manually adjust the font size and padding of table cells to match the strength of your eyes and your fingers’ clumsiness. In the current version a restart is necessary for the changes to take full effect.
• I added a link to the original article in the built-in entry browser. Neither does it look very elegant nor is it nice to navigate, but being an often requested feature, I added it nonetheless. Why do some people only aggregate summaries, anyway?
• A lot of bug fixes: people who are subscribed to a vast number of blogs should no longer experience crashes upon synchronizing; canceled subscriptions don’t haunt you any longer; feeds with GET parameters in the URL work properly; …

Let me know what you think of the new version and, as usual, post bug reports to the project page.

To keep track of bugs and feature requests, I also set up a project page on Google Code, so it would be great if you could post them there.

A new version of Feeds is available through my repository the ModMyiFone.com repository.

Changelist

- Journaling implemented — blog entries that you read offline now will correctly be marked as read on the server side during the next synchronization
- Smarter syncing: when the number of unread items reported by the Google Reader API corresponds to the one on the iPhone and there are no new entries, nothing will be downloaded. This enormously reduces the time spent on synchronizing.
- New application style with a fancy button bar
- A lot of small bug fixes and some memory management cleanup

Versions that «Feeds» has been reported to be working on are:

- 1.1.1 iPod Touch
- 1.1.2 iPhone (thanks to Bigli)
- 1.1.3 iPhone (thanks to Roman)
- 1.1.4 iPod Touch / iPhone

How to Install

In your Installer.app, add the repository http://424f.com/iphone/repository. After refreshing the repositories, you should find an entry «Feeds» in the category «Network». Install it like every other App. When you start it for the first time, the settings dialogue will automatically appear and prompt you for your username and password. After that you can now synchronize with Google Reader and download all those witty blog entries.

What’s missing?

• Synchronization works only one way — while changes made on the Google Reader website are reflected correctly on the iPhone, it currently does not work the other way around. This is the most important feature planned for the next version.
• There’s no folder view, so if you have a lot of different feeds, the feed list might look quite messy.
• x — feel free to tell me what the value of x is and chances are that it won’t be missing anymore in a future version

For a few days now, I’ve been playing around with the iPhone’s unofficial SDK on my Ubuntu machine. Last friday, I finished milestone I of my very first app. It’s a simple news reader using the (also still unofficial) Google Reader API. Currently, it does retrieve your feeds and entries directly from Google every time you view them, so it’s not very useful in places without W-LAN (which, according to rumors, still exist). But now that the fundamentals are there, I’m going to add the really cool features.

My wish list:

• Store all data in a local SQLite database
• Allow the user to search amongst feed contents and the tagging system
• An offline mode
• One-Button-Synchronization™ between the iPhone and Google Reader

As soon as the basic offline features are working, I’ll probably upload a beta version on this blog along with the source code. Until then, here are a few screenshots.

Screenshots

In the settings screen you can completely customize the application to match your personal preferences. Well, not really, but at least I spoil your eyes with a few icons from the fantastic fam fam fam icon set.

This is the feed view. In future versions it will hopefully be possible to swap between different feeds by just vertically scrolling beyond the visible area.

PS: I know that with MobileRSS there already is a native news reader for the iPhone. While it is indeed a very cool app, I don’t like the fact that I have to manage my subscriptions twice: once on my iPhone and once on my desktop. Apart from that it’s also fun to see your own application running on your iPhone (or iPod Touch in my case)