TechgnosisWeb ReBoot

Katsushiro says:

Hey there, thanks for the quick response, and it’s my pleasure to provide feedback. I actually like FeederReader a lot (I hope I made that clear in the little review), and I’m keeping an eye on it in expectation of the day that it becomes my official RSS reader/enclosure reader on my iPaq.

Thanks for the tip on the workaround for dealing with the ‘download all enclosures at once’ thing, as for the part where I said that manual download is useless, I actually didn’t mean it that way, what I meant was that for someone like me, who doesn’t have a WiFi card in his iPaq, or any other sort of net connection other than just ActiveSync when I get home in the afternoons and in the mornings before I get to work, manually downloading enclosures one by one is fairly useless *to me*. This is actually a complaint I have with most RSS readers I’ve tried on the iPaq, they seem to expect me to be connected to the Net all the time. illium’s Newsbreak, which is the one I use most often, for example, downloads the RSS feeds pretty well, but I would like it to download the images that are included on the individual RSS items as well when it’s updating the feeds, instead of waiting for me to bring up the individual RSS entry before attempting to fetch the image. This makes certain feeds, like, for example, Engadget and Gizmodo, which often include pictures of items, pretty useless to me while I’m in checking my RSS feeds in line somewhere or while having lunch. If FeederReader can pre-fetch stuff like inline images in feeds for me when it uploads its feed listing, that alone would put it over the top for me.

What I meant about the manual uploads being useless, to me at least, is that since I’m not connected to the Net while I’m actually skimming through the RSS feeds, then downlading the enclosures at the moment is not an option for me. I do see your point on being able to tell it to download all enclosures in a certain feed or even categories manually, and i actually like that feature, but generally I need my RSS reader to download the enclosures and content I want during my downtime at home using the auto-update feature, which ties into why I was a bit dissapointed with not currently being able to tell FeederReader in advance how many enclosures I wanted it to fetch.

While I’m on that note, perhaps a way to limit enlosures by size might be appreciated by us size-conscious PDA users. Being able to tell it to not automatically download enclosures bigger than a certain size (but still having the option to download those enclosures manually if we so want) would be a boon. Being able to set a max limit on how much space I want to allow FeederReader to use in total would also be good (For example, telling it to use no more than 250 MB on my 512 MB SD card). Also, being able to specify on a feed-by-feed or category-by-category basis wether I want enclosures on those feeds to be automatically updated or not (instead of having it be global all-or-none) might be asking for too much, but it’s something to think about.

As for stopping and deleting partial enclosures, I actually tried exactly the procedure you outlines, but I didn’t have any luck with it. Telling it to expire a partially downloaded entry didn’t seem to do anything when I tried it. Of course, I notice you released an updated version a couple of days ago, and I was using the previous one, so perhaps it’s something that wasn’t working in the version I used and it’s fixed now. I’ll have to try it again. In any case, being able to stop downloads manually without having to actually unplug the PocketPC from the computer or from the Net would be good.

As for the crashes, well, I can’t remember the general details, but I’ll be a good tester and keep a closer eye on them from now on and report them when I can.

One last thing I wanted to mention, which I think I forgot to mention on the podcast, was the Status Bar at the bottom of the screen that pops up and changes colors when the feeds are updating. While I’m all for the status bar itself, I didn’t find the feedback it gave me very useful. There was no indication as to what the numbers or colors meant, so I never really knew what the application was doing at any given point. Was it downloading enclosures? Updating RSS feeds? What do the numbers mean? Is one of them total messages and the other one downloaded messages? Or is that total/downloaded feeds? Or is it a percentage? I found that a bit confusing. Some sort of labeling there would probably help a lot, as I like to know what my programs are doing. My ideal status bar would show Total Feeds/Updated Feeds, a Download Rate Indicator, maybe a Total Downloaded indicator in MB’s, and a ‘Updating/Updated/Downloading’ indicator at one end where I can tell at a glance what its doing.

Anyway, I’m going to be joining up on the FeederReader support group today, so you’re likely to be hearing back from me more often. And don’t worry, your $9 will be on the way soon, just as soon as I get paid myself.

Greg Smith says:

I agree about a lot of things you mention here. And they are on my wishlist, too. I’m trying to get a good balance between feature creep and stability. My primary focus right now is getting to and through Beta. I’m not too worried about your “useless” comment. I took it the way you meant it, that it was not very useful *to you*. The way I use it is when I’m ready to download enclosures, I just hit All | Update | Enclosures after I connect to the internet. I still consider this “manual”. The “automatic” is selected by turning ON Tools | Options… | Enclosure Tab | Download On Update. I expect that with the flexibility of FeederReader, we’ll all have different ways of doing the same thing.

On the Status Bar, I agree it could use clearer labelling, but I’m always fighting the “Clear labelling” vs. “Small screen” thing. The Status Bar shows the “top” feed status (this gives you a general status and makes it useful if you’re only updating one feed). The two numbers show both queues: the Feed Queue and the Enclosure Queue. They are completely separate queues so that they don’t stop each other from downloading. They are count down numbers which don’t need an “X out of Y” type thing. Largely because you can add to the queue at any time. Just tap Download on the Enclosure Toolbar (for enclosures) or Update RSS Feed on the Tap-and-Hold RSS popup and it will be added to the respective queue.

Pre-fetch images is on my list as well. It will be one of the first things I implement when I get feed parsing implemented (I have some code that does the parsing, but nothing programmed that does anything with the parsed information). I have a cool idea on dealing with subscribing to feeds and dealing with links in general that relies on parsing, too. But these will be implemented after Beta and Final release. I have to be real selective about what I implement right now because I want to get to Beta. So I’m focused on functionality that has no workaround and stability.

Oh, and you can set a number of KB on your storage card and FeederReader will stop enclosure downloads when that number is reached.

Let’s continue this on the FeederReader message board. I’ll copy this conversation over there so I can capture some of these ideas.