<metaname="description"content="NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world. A new sound of an old instrument."/>
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<p>Every NewsBlur client, from the three official clients (web, iOS, and Android) to all third-party clients, should now be showing better embeds for Twitter, Instagram, and Imgur. Just take a look at these screenshots.</p>
<p>And don’t forget that even YouTube gets special treatment on all three platforms. Here on the web, you can see that YouTube videos are automatically expanded to fill the screen.</p>
<p>So there you go, enjoy the new embeds (also called oEmbeds, whatever that means). And if you have any suggestions for new embeds, just submit an idea to <ahref="http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur.">http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur.</a></p>
<p>Holy geez, this is a whopper of a release. Version 5.0 of the NewsBlur iOS app has lots and lots of new features, fixes for some long standing issues, and major performance improvements for reading stories.</p>
<p>The biggest new feature to hit the iOS app is the introduction of premium fonts from type foundry Hoefler & Co. Whitney, Gotham Narrow, and Chronicle have been added to give NewsBlur a more pleasurable reading experience. Take a look for yourself.</p>
<p>Comment-less shares have also been added to the iOS app. You can now share a story and your friends can now reply without you having to write anything first, just like on the web and on the Android app.</p>
<p>Here’s the full list of new features and improvements. Make a cup of tea first because this list is a doozy.</p>
<ul>
<li>The app has been iOS 9-ified.</li>
<li>The iOS app now has the same great fonts from the web: Whitney, Gotham Narrow, and Chronicle. These each look fantastic.</li>
<li>The Text view is now sticky based on the last view you used. It’s per feed but it also respects individual feeds when reading by folder. This is unlike the web, where the Text view matches the feed or folder. Now it’s sticky to the feed, which makes it much easier to read through a folder of stories.</li>
<li>When switching between the Text view and Story view, the loading indicator is now at the bottom of the screen instead of directly on top of the story.</li>
<li>Stories now remember your last scroll position. When you go back to a story, you are taken back to the same place you left off.</li>
<li>New Safari-based browser for the original story. These views are faster and support content blockers on iOS 9 and use your browser’s cookies. However, they look like Safari and not NewsBlur, so the default in-app browser is the original browser. The new in-app Safari browser is a preference, along with Chrome, Opera, and the full Safari app.</li>
<li>A new option to mark stories as read when they are scrolled past. Defaults to off.</li>
<li>Sending stories to third-party services now uses full Text if available. Useful for storing full story text in Evernote or Pocket.</li>
<li>Comment-less shares are now supported, allowing you to reply to shared stories that have no comment.</li>
<li>The feed trainer now shows trained titles.</li>
<li>1Password integration on login.</li>
<li>iPad Pro is now supported.</li>
<li>Date and times of stories now uses the system locale, so everybody who isn’t in the U.S. will see dates as they should be.</li>
<li>3D Touch actions: Add site, all site stories, search stories.</li>
<li>Voiceover support.</li>
<li>iOS 8 is the minimum supported version for this release.</li>
</ul>
<p>Hot dog that’s a lot in one release. Version 5.0 is now ready for you. <ahref="http://www.newsblur.com/ios">Download it for free on the App Store</a>.</p>
<p>If you like living on the bleeding edge, you should join the NewsBlur iOS beta program. You’ll get access to the latest releases a few weeks before they go out publicly.</p>
<p>All you need to do is add your email address to this form: <ahref="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XSerwoY-PEJ7JfglNr0zOKpsoMXqplSomdORSDsZ3_g/viewform?usp=send_form">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XSerwoY-PEJ7JfglNr0zOKpsoMXqplSomdORSDsZ3_g/viewform?usp=send_form</a></p>
<p>You might be wondering why this is a bit different than the older method used in the past. The old beta program used an enterprise distribution provision profile, which was available as a workaround to install apps on devices without having to go through the App Store. Unfortunately that program has ended and Apple now recommends using their new TestFlight beta program.</p>
<p>In order to use TestFlight, email addresses of interested beta testers need to be collected. But the benefit is that you can now easily move between beta and release versions. You will also automatically upgrade to the release version when it comes out. You can also give feedback in a more accurate way, with your device and OS version automatically added to anything you write as feedback.</p>
<p>So if you want to try out the latest betas, specifically for iOS 9 and a whole bundle of new features, then add your email to that list and watch your inbox. It can take up to a couple days for these emails to be imported, so be patient.</p>
<p>Here we are today with version 4.5.0 of the NewsBlur Android App. This is a great release because we took our time to update and improve a number of things about the app.</p>
<p>The app now has the common header shared between all of NewsBlur’s first-class clients (web, iOS, and Android).</p>
<p>Here’s the full changelog for version 4.5.0 (October 2015):</p>
<ul>
<li>Reduced CPU and battery usage</li>
<li>New activities/interactions list</li>
<li>Updated feed list UI</li>
<li>Explainers for empty lists</li>
<li>Support for more types of alt/title text on images</li>
<li>Better error messaging</li>
<li>Tons of bug fixes, especially around offline usage</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s a <ahref="http://www.newsblur.com/android">free download</a> and continues to get faster and more reliable. If you want to vote on which features you’d like to see next, <ahref="https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Aandroid">comment here on NewsBlur’s GitHub repo</a>.</p>
<p>These folders keep track of sites you add and remove from them. They also allow you to filter out stories you don’t want to read or even choose to only show the stories you have in focus.</p>
<p>All of your feed subscriptions in the folder, including subfolders, are merged into a single river of news in RSS format. Technically we use Atom 1.0 format for NewsBlur’s many RSS feeds, but I’m not choosing a side here.</p>
<p>The Folder RSS feeds join the Shared Stories RSS feeds and the Saved Story Tag RSS feeds that you can already use if you are a premium subscriber.</p>
<p>Used to be that a friend shares a story without commenting on it and you’d be out of luck in trying to reply or thank them for sharing it.</p>
<p>Not anymore! Comment-less shares now have the ability to be replied to and favorited. Take a look at this recent story on <ahref="http://popular.newsblur.com/story/a-plea-for-culinary-/ee1275">The People Have Spoken</a>.</p>
<p>YouTube, owned by Google, deprecated their v2 APIs on April 20th, 2015, which means that RSS news readers can no longer watch for new videos. What a bummer!</p>
<p>Except it’s not at all a big deal because here at NewsBlur we’re making sure that your videos keep coming in. Previously <ahref="https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/youtube-eliminating-support-for-rss-atom">enterprising users setup hacks and workarounds for the API</a>, which was a somewhat tedious solution as you had to update each feed and prone to breaking in the future.</p>
<p>But there’s good news today because NewsBlur now has a custom-built solution for YouTube videos. All of your existing YouTube RSS feeds are automatically ported over to the new YouTube video fetcher.</p>
<p>There are currently three ways to read stories on NewsBlur:</p>
<ul>
<li>List view: every story is a single line and read inline</li>
<li>Split view: two panes of stories, one for story titles and the other for story content</li>
<li>Full view: every story is fully expanded and ready for reading</li>
</ul>
<p>Each of these views has its own benefits and drawbacks, and each of these views can be further customized. The Split view, for instance, can place story titles on top, below, or to the left of the story content. The Full view can auto-truncate stories so that you only see a couple paragraphs at a time so long stories don’t overwhelm you.</p>
<p>Today I’m launching a new view: the Grid view.</p>
<p>The Grid view is half-way between the Full view and the List view. It provides big previews of the images from a story as well as several lines of content. It’s not as overwhelming as the Full view and it doesn’t force every story on a single line.</p>
<p>You can also customize the Grid view to only show as many stories per line as you like.</p>
<p>The Grid view is perfect for sites and folders that contain a lot of images. And because you can now preview a larger part of the story, it makes sense to add a new preference that allows you to mark stories as read as you scroll without having to open up the story.</p>
<p>However, the Grid view is not perfect for all feeds. That’s why I’m introducing another big change today. The four views are now saved on a per-feed and per-folder basis. You can choose a default layout in Preferences, but each feed/folder overrides that preference.</p>
<p>This can become a bit complicated if you have a lot of overrides and want to instead just reset all of your layouts. So you can now reset both layouts and views for all feeds and folders right from the Preferences dialog.</p>
<p>I hope you enjoy this new story layout. And as always, tell your friends about NewsBlur. World of mouth is killer and it’s how NewsBlur is able to be a success.</p>
<p>The beauty of NewsBlur is that you can start off with only a handful of subscriptions and naturally work your way up. This is actually the reason that free accounts cut off at 64 sites. When I started building NewsBlur in 2009 I only subscribed to 42 sites. Nowadays it’s closer to 200 sites.</p>
<p>Because NewsBlur makes it so easy to pare down individual stories with the intelligence trainer, you can follow more blogs without feeling overwhelmed. But that also leads to oversubscribing to sites that just don’t publish anymore. Or even subscribing to sites that publish too often.</p>
<p>Launching today is the Organizer. This organizer helps you identify sites that may be posting too much or too little and then gives you the power to move and delete them all at once. Sure, you can do this one-by-one, but that takes time, and only in the new Organizer is everything right in front of you.</p>
<p>You can sort sites, both in and out of your folders, with the following orders:</p>
<ul>
<li>By name</li>
<li>By number of subscribers</li>
<li>By frequency of updates (stories per day)</li>
<li>By last story posted</li>
<li>By the number of times you’ve opened the site</li>
</ul>
<p>You can multi-select sites and move/delete them in one single batch edit. You can even move a bunch of sites to a new folder that you can create right in the Organizer. This makes moving sites around so much easier. You can even click on the folder title to select every site underneath that folder.</p>
<p>Try out the new Organizer and let me know how it works. And go hog wild because you will be emailed a backup of your sites after you move or delete anything. You will only be emailed a backup a max of once per day, as to not overwhelm you when you’re making a bunch of edits.</p>
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<p>NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world.<br/>
