I just want to say this is a great app. I was reluctant to buy it since there are already so many RSS readers but this one takes the cake. Good job. I am even impressed by the simple UI.
- Sync with Google Reader as has been mentioned before. I use the RIM apps on my Playbook and Bold, but I assume this isn't possible to sync with.
The downloaded images are stored into /shared/photos/readitoffline/ . For better or for worse, you can actually browse, view and delete the images in this folder via the Pictures app on the PlayBook. If you enable file sharing on your PlayBook all of the files are easily accessible. :)
Thanks! The support should be better really, but I took a 3 week break from the computer (as much as you can these days) because of rather intense wrist and hand pain from working far too much in recent months. Nearly fully healed now though, so I hope to keep updates rolling in.
Yeah, the lag is definitely only in grabbing feeds - once it's on the device it's very speedy.
What you described is exactly what I want this app to be able to do, but am limited by the framework RIM has provided to us developers. Ideally at app install time I could add a background service that runs at scheduled times during the day and updates the feeds - this would allow users of Read It Offline to plug their PlayBook in to be charged during the night and to retrieve their feeds at 6 AM so they can read fresh content on their commute to work.
The next best alternative would be being able to sense when the PlayBook has entered idle mode and to do the update then, while the user is not actively playing with the device.
Unfortunately background services aren't possible on the PlayBook, nor is sensing if idle mode has been activated. Thus the best use case I can recommend is to load the app in the morning, hit the refresh button in the top left corner, and then shower/shave/get ready to head to the office. The app will surely be fully updated and ready for when you pull it out of your bag.
Yeah, the only way I'd contemplate dependency on an outside server is if there was a fallback option built in, but now we're getting rather complicated (and in complications like potential bugs). This is just one of those areas where the tech hasn't caught up yet.
I'll take my BlackBerry home from the office today and will test this out, but I can't imagine there would be an issue using the app over Bridge.
Thanks! Yeah, I will be looking into Google Reader sync. I hope it's possible (of course use of Google Reader is, but I wonder how it will work with the full text retrieval I do in Read It Offline).
OK, I just bought it and now will try adding my hundred feeds! :D
For now, with 14 everything is fine.
The UI is almost hypnotically excellent, with exquisite details appearing only whenever needed, like where you are in an article, in %, when you are scrolling it, or this "Aa" little icon that will change font size if need be...
It's incredibly distinct and better than all the previous reader I tried, and there are many.
Not a glitch but somehow unexpected: when switching from a source feed to another in the 3-panes view, the middle pane gets (normally) updated with the new article list, but the rightmost one still contains the last read article from the previous feed. Indeed rather logical after all, but surprising because you find yourself with "feed X" list and a really non-related article side by side.
Wish: that one could reorder the feed list, maybe by long-clicking there in the list, or long-clicking in the specific pane dedicated to adding/removing?
The best bit is that it works with Readibility, which at the moment works with BB email to send articles to (currently Pocket does not work in sending emails to add links to your list, so Read it Pro is kind of useless to me until its fixed).
The updates make it that much better :)
i wish we have bunch of preset rss/feeds links (like in pulse) rather than have to type in the web address of the feeds..??
presets won't be yours, but I suppose they'd be easy to install: there are already two in the default installation. The main issue I see is, with 50 feeds by default the initial loading will give new users a bad impression ("this software is slow"!)
From this perspective it'd be better to allow selecting in a list afterwards, but again I'm skeptical about feeds being selected for me. On my home mac I follow hundreds of them, and still I doubt they'd be in any list.
Ideally Read It Offline should accept importing .opml files, a standard for RSS description exchanges. But then again, being a brand new development with plenty of features to develop, I'm not sure that this one is the most important...
Maybe someone with lots of feed urls available on a PC could use Dukto to transfer them one at a time via clipboard exchanges? Dukto indeed is efficient for simple and quick clipboard transfers (among others)
H.
Hey, thanks! The original design work was by Thiago Silva, an astonishingly good designer I actually met on these very forums.
The article in the main reader pane purposely is left unswitched when you select a different feed to scan through - I can also have it automatically select the top-most or last item in the new feed, but not knowing what expected user behaviour is in such a situation I figured I'd try to do less. Anyone else have an opinion on what should happen in this case?
Interesting, I didn't actually know you could use Readability like that. I use the bookmarklet on my desktop PC and tried to do the same on the PlayBook, but the PlayBook browser doesn't allow you to edit the URL of bookmarks - what a silly oversight.
I've been debating doing this, but I keep wondering how useful it would really be. I figured people using RSS readers in 2012 know exactly what feeds they want to follow and don't need advice, but I could be wrong. I need to send out a questionnaire somehow...
Ah, you think like a developer. :) Yeah, that's a big reason there are only 2 default feeds - I actually started out with another 2 (a feed from readitoffline.com to keep users updated on the app's development, and Longreads because I love the articles they feed) but the slowdown during the tutorial screens is already noticeable enough.
Adding Google Reader support seems like the best method to allow people to quickly import feeds, so I think that may be the main goal of the next big update. I also want to add in read/unread visual cues as I imagine people find that important as well.
Hi lavo96,
sure does pocket work with sending emails to add links to your list: Pocket | How to Save to Pocket via Email
Nothing easier than that. :)
Cheers,
Sven
Don't change it for me alone, I definitely can live with it. It was just surprising.
Just to say, I proceeded to use Dukto like I mentioned earlier, and it does work reasonably, in the sense that when launching the (free) Dukto utility on both machines, from the PC I can copy an RSS url, send it via Dukto to the Playbook, get it in the PB clip, and paste it in Read it Offline. It's definitely fault-proof for long urls, but still a bit lengthy.
Maybe we should devise a way to get a bunch of urls at a time on the PB (in a file) and then copy from there.
Other than that, yes, having a visual clue for those posts that are read or not, is quite important.
Also, another question raised earlier: when is Read It Offline "purging" its database to remove old posts? (I presume: old posts that are read and not starred)
Is it silent at each quit and restart? Or will we be able to set a kind of "obsolescence duration", like, I want to keep them all one week then forget them?
Last thing: Yllus I emailed you a small list of RSS urls that are not parsed well (some contain images that are not loaded, for others Read It Offline honestly says he didn't succeed...) -one of them is the RSS of this very forum, which maybe you should analyze first ;) so as to give it as an example in the App store text afterwards!
Herv�
Yllus, I came to your software for its RSS capabilities, but I am now discovering Readability, which is very well processed in your app: maybe you should insist a bit more in the App World description on this feature?
At the moment, Readability is mentioned almost at the end of the text; maybe you should insist on the fact it's the only client so far on Playbook, and offline with this?
It's not that I am maniac with Readability (I prefer RSS), but still you seem the only guy around on this ;)
H.
It actually wouldn't be that difficult to make the app look for a text file at a particular location on the PlayBook device, and if found, take a list of RSS feeds in that file and add each of them. I'll add that to my to-do list (and I also need to add a "Help" icon somewhere so people can repeat the tutorial, which I'll need to mention this functionality in).
Every time the update button is pressed, after pulling in new content a cleanup process silently runs and deletes articles and images for items that are not in the most recent 150 items for that feed. I'm not aware of any API provided by RIM that would let me execute code when the app is closed, else I would do that instead.
Yeah, I got your e-mail and will be working through those feeds tonight (or otherwise on Saturday); sadly the nature of the full text algorithm will always mean that I'll need to react to user feedback and fix feeds when the algorithm is confused. Still, it doesn't appear to happen all too often...
I know! Midway through development I actually considered splitting the app into two - Read It Offline was going to continue to have Readability built in, but I also approached Readability themselves and offered to release a scaled down app modeled after their iPad/Android UI that only did Readability things. They considered it but ultimately legal issues with allowing outside developers to use their name meant a no.
The problem really is that if you mix your marketing message, neither comes out sounding very strong - so I chose to concentrate on the RSS full text reader element. Someone better with words might be able to achieve balance, though...
You are perfectly right.
And moreover, you do stay the only Playbook Readibility application, after all, and any reasonable candidate will undoubtedly find this very discussion and all the detail in it :)
I just tried this Readibility feature that I merely didn't know, getting the full New York Review of Books offline and perfectly clean : it was a pleasure.
Not quite that easy.....as I have been to'ing and fro'ing with Pocket on this one. The emails sent from a bb get scrambled at Pocket's end. They say they are working on it, but still no joy :/ Otherwise I'd be using ReadOnTouch a lot more!
Cheers
Rod
For me:
- the capacity to handle a larger variety of RSS feeds (presently there are some that are not properly handled, among which... the RSS from this very forum! ;) ). Maybe allow some kind of "feed reporting" on the website, where people could show you an original RSS url and a pasted version of what they want from it?
Or then give access to some RegExp customization for a given feed?
- a GUI with rightmost controls slightly more apart from each other (I don't want to aim when selecting the "full screen" mode, to avoid unexpectingly 'starring' an article -- this does not happen with the other controls)
- more specifically, when navigating in an article, at present the screen rightmost zone below the controls is not operating: this is quite frustrating when swiping through the page, because you have to specifically move your finger more to the left while there is no visible frontier for this. Allowing actual swipe control below the star and Aa icons would be very comfortable and somehow, more "logical"
- a possibility to export starred articles to pdf or html (creating archives, which also would allow cleaning the current database: maybe even an "export and un-star" option)
Indeed archiving would be a dream come true for me
- an improved "search" capacity (e. g. I want all articles containing the following two words...)
- a location for the images that would not be scanned by the "photos" application, which currently shows me some 1000 icons and article images whenever I want to search one of *my* photos ;)
- a more readable progress indicator when feeds are being updated: for people like me (>200 articles each time) the indication skweezes two three-digits numbers in a very small place, and honestly I can't read anything at arm's length. Maybe just a graphical progress indicator � la pie chart would be enough (after all, nobody is interested to know exactly how many feeds have been processed, what is important is the global percentage: I see the pie closing fast, I'm happy)
- maybe using the standard PB menu GUI for Readability and RSS setup, which would allow setup icons to disappear in normal use? At least, the present situation is funny because after more than one month of daily use, I found myself forgetting the purpose of these two icons because I *never* used them recently ;)
All the best for Read It Offline!
Herv�
To developer: when will new version be released? I'm still waiting for support of Google Reader.
Yllus, any chance you are still active on Read It Offline since last June?
(or maybe you already are at translating it to BB10? ;) )
I'm re-reading my wishes above; I think the most critical ones should be to become compatible from more RSS/sites, to accelerate a bit the database (more indexing maybe?), and a capacity to export starred items to pdf, so as to alleviate RIO itself (and create a lasting archive at the same time)
All the best,
Herv�