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The NewsBlur iPhone and iPad app meets iOS 7
Apple’s latest operating system for iOS is a departure from their old aesthetic. So I’ve decided to give the NewsBlur iOS app a slightly new look. But even more than how the app looks is how the app works. Tons of new features made it into this mega-release.
- Entire interface has been redesigned for iOS 7.
- Gestures galore: mark stories as read/unread, save stories, mark feeds as read, train feeds.
- Long press a feed or folder to choose a mark as read date: 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days. Works offline, too!
- Long press a story title to send it to a third-party read later service.
- New view layout for iPad: move story titles to the bottom in portrait.
- Significantly improved scrolling speeds on the feed list and story list.
- You can now unread stories that were read while offline.
- Faster marking of folders as read.
- Fixed numerous bugs related to reading stories while offline.
The iPad app also has a new view for extra-wide reading while in portrait orientation.
I hope you enjoy this latest update. And stay tuned for the next update coming soon which will include even more iOS 7 features: Dynamic Text Size and Background Updates. The NewsBlur iOS app is and will always be free.
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Offline reading with the NewsBlur iOS app
Today I’m launching version 3.0 of the iPhone and iPad app for NewsBlur. This major update brings loads of big features that combine to make the world’s best iOS news reader with the fastest sync in town.
- Offline support - stories and images are downloaded quickly and in parallel.
- Syncing - read stories offline or with little connectivity.
- Preferences - override global order/read filter settings, configure offline, and other options.
- Send to - rewritten to include single-tap Instapaper/Readability/Pocket integration.
- Saved and shared stories now show the proper icon.
- Activities/interactions have been rewritten to be easier on the eyes.
- A major performance improvement when returning to the app and when initially syncing.
The biggest feature since this Spring’s redesign is finally here. As always, the iOS app is a free download.
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Upping unread stories to 30 days for premium accounts
While I love shipping new features and fixing bugs, the single largest user request was neither a feature nor a bug. NewsBlur allows for two weeks of unread stories. Once a story is more than 14 days old, it would no longer show up as unread. The justification for this was simple: you have a week to read a story, and have a second week as a grace period.
But after scaling out to tens of thousands of users, a new pattern emerged. Some users would go on vacation for two weeks at a time and then want to catch up on everything they missed. Some users only check RSS once a month. Some users just want to leave lightly updated feeds alone until they have free time to read them, and that can take a few weeks to get to.
Starting today, all premium users are automatically upgraded to 30 days of unread stories. Free standard users will remain at 14 days. I wish I could have offered the full 30 days to everybody, but after testing that out, my server and performance graphs all made a very scary movement up.
With the new 30 day unread interval in place, NewsBlur has a great track record in listening to user feedback and working out a solution, however large the task may be.
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Mark as read by number of days and other improvements
Here’s a few big improvements for the NewsBlur website.
- The site title bar is now mounted to the bottom of the screen. This will allow you to mark a site/folder as read at any time.
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Marking as read can go back a configurable amount: 1, 3, 7, and 14 days back.
- If you’re reading in newest-first order, when you mark a site as read, any newer stories that have come in since you’ve loaded the site will no longer be marked as read.
- When you add, move, or delete a site or folder, all of your open web browsers will reload to correctly show the change. This allows you to have NewsBlur open at home and at work, knowing they will be synced when you change or add sites.
You may be thinking to yourself, 1, 3, and 7 days back makes sense, but why 14 if the unread limit is at 14 days? Why, having 14 days as an option would only make sense if the full limit was… (stay tuned).
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Simple Search for Feeds, Saved Stories, and Blurblogs
Search, which can easily be considered one of the most important features of a world-class news reader, is also one of the most difficult features to build.
While working on the feature, I came across a great method that allows searching through story titles, authors, and tags on a per-feed basis. It’s not perfect and it’s not the full feature, but this will get us 80% of the way there.
Also comes with a handy keyboard shortcut (and a refactored keyboard shortcut dialog).
You can also search your saved stories and shared stories. This feature will soon find it’s way to both Android and iOS, and is available today to all premium users.
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NewsBlur Puzzle T-shirt 2013
Last year I was proud to be able to send a free t-shirt and handwritten note to every single user who requested one. It took a few days of writing, stuffing, and mailing to send out a couple hundred t-shirts.
I’m pleased to announce that this year’s t-shirt is a puzzle with every single letter being part of a 4+ letter word. I’m using Teespring for fulfillment and order processing. While it’s not free, I am making absolutely zilch profit, so I can keep the t-shirt price to the absolute minimum.
Impress your friends with your esoteric yet exquisite taste in t-shirts. But you’d better move quickly, you only have until July 31st, one week from now, to order the t-shirt. Order the 2013 NewsBlur t-shirt on Teespring.
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Text view comes to the NewsBlur iOS app
The iOS apps are finding themselves host to a whole slew of additions and enhancements. Today I get to tell you about the iOS app’s newest feature: the Text view.
You can already use the Text view on the web. It’s great for extracting the story’s content on demand and helps you stay on a single tab to do all of your reading.
If you have an iPad or iPhone, you can now use the Text view by hitting the Text/Story button on the bottom left of the story detail pane.
On Android? Don’t you worry, major updates are finishing up as we speak, and soon the Android app will reach full feature parity with the iOS app. It’s just a matter of time.
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Read NewsBlur on your Mac with the new ReadKit
ReadKit, a native Mac app for reading Instapaper, Pocket, and NewsBlur on your desktop, completes the RSS reading trifecta. NewsBlur has a web app, native iOS app, and now a native Mac app.
While this is not an official app, it’s certainly the best desktop app for NewsBlur. In time more NewsBlur-specific features will be added, such as shared stories (blurblogs), training and separate unread counts in focus mode, and saved stories.
If you’re a developer and want to make your own NewsBlur app, use the free NewsBlur API. You can charge for your app and enjoy all of the benefits of the NewsBlur backend.
Download ReadKit to enjoy offline reading on your Mac.
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Keyboard Shortcuts Manager
Hot on the heels of the redesign launch, I’m already putting out new features. There are a number of post-redesign priorities on my list, but one of the most requested features is to customize the keyboard shortcuts.
After looking into the common refrain of customizable keyboard shortcuts, I identified the five keys that folks are talking about 99% of the time: the four arrow keys and the space bar. These keys can now be configured well beyond what you would expect.
- By default, the horizontal arrow keys control the view in which you are reading a site or folder. But there are a few keyboard shortcuts that allow you to temporarily read a story in the Text view (shift+enter) or the Story view (enter). So having other dedicated keys may not be necessary. And navigating between sites requires a two-key combination (shift+up and shift+down or shift+j and shift+k). You can now choose to make the left and right arrow keys navigate between sites.
- The vertical arrow keys navigates between stories, but some users want them to scroll up and down by a small amount. You can customize exactly how much of a scroll distance you want to use.
- The space bar, like the new up and down arrow keys, scrolls the page, but it does so by screen-load. So instead of scrolling by a set amount like the arrow keys, it works on a percentage of the screen. It’s a subtle difference that will allow you to more easily navigate the longer stories and the shorter stories with ease.
These features are only available to premium subscribers and I hope you like them. If you have additional customization suggestions, hop on the support forum and let me know.
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The NewsBlur Redesign
Not to say that NewsBlur was ugly before today, but it certainly didn’t have the loving embrace of a talented designer. So without waiting another moment (or month) I proudly present the NewsBlur redesign.
It’s a full scale redesign, too. And not just one of those redesigns where the icons get glossier and fonts, bolder. Every moving piece of machinery got more than a coat of paint. A number of new crucial reading features have been added. Some features were merged, some were repaired, and some were scrapped.
Dashboard before & after:
Reading before & after:
In no particular order, here’s what’s new:
- Unified interactions/activities popover. Gets out of your way and gives the dashboard more room to breath.
- Rewritten feed loader, offering incredible performance, even at the 20x scale of today vs 2 months ago before the Google Reader announcement.
- Custom vector graphics, retina-fying the entire site.
- Increased transparency of sites by showing more detail in feed fetching/statistics.
- A new List view to complement the Split view for stories.
And that’s just for the website. The iOS app, Android app, and blurblogs all got the update goodness that has graced the web app.
As for what’s happening these days, post-Reader:
- Took some extra time to scale out my backend, now completed.
- Running on 48 servers, serving 20x traffic
- Because I had the foresight to charge users for premium service, I’m now confident that NewsBlur will be standing tall a few years from now.
- Working on the next few big ticket features: saved story search and tagging, batch editing organizer, keyboard shortcut manager, and more.
Biggest unanticipated consequence of the Reader shutdown – I no longer have to wear a jacket in SF because my core temperature has risen.
— Samuel Clay (@samuelclay)
And if you’re new to NewsBlur, here’s the six core benefits to using the one with the Sun:
- Training - hide the stories you don’t like and highlight the stories you do. Make mincemeat out of heavy feeds and make sure to never miss stories from the feeds you love.
- Original site - read a publisher’s stories the way they wanted you to read it - on the original website. NewsBlur embeds the publisher’s site in an iframe, and marks what you read as read as you scroll.
- Text view - conveniently extracts the story text from articles, necessary for reading truncated rss feeds.
- Blurblogs / sharing - a social community where you can share and discuss stories with friends.
- Speed - A dedication to fast load times, graphed on your dashboard.
- Mobile - native, first-class iOS and Android apps, with all of the functionality of the website.
Now that the redesign has launched, I plan to blog about how to best use the intelligence trainer efficiently, all new [future] features, and how I was able to successfully scale out the four databases (count ‘em: postgresql, mongodb, redis, elasticsearch) to handle more than 10,000 users and 4 million site updates a day. It’s no Tumblr, but it’s still way more traffic than you can fit on a single machine.
Thanks for using NewsBlur and turning my passion project (four years running) into a full-time dream.
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