After starting News Wall for the first time two feeds are already there. You can add as many RSS feeds as you like. First, open up the settings screen by tapping on the little (i) at the top right corner.

Now press the “Edit” button at the top of this screen. Besides deleting and re-ordering feeds, you now can add a new feed by pressing the “plus” button which is right handed at the top.

There are two ways to subscribe to a feed. First, just enter the URL of a webpage or a feed and press on “Validate”. Second, open the build-in Feed Browser by tapping on “Open Browser”.

When using the Feed Browser you navigate to the page you want to use. When a feed is found, the RSS icon get visible. By tapping on it you open the list of discovered feeds. Now you simply need to select the desired feed. That’s it.

The screenshots are taken from an iPad. The screens look different on an iPhone but they work exactly the same way. This applies both to the paid and the free version.

User’s are expierencing an error when automatic loading is enabled. After starting the app, News Wall cannot connect to its backend server.

This only happens on iPad. The update has already been submitted.

When you read an article it gets marked as read automatically. Every feed displays the number of unread articles. The sum of all articles statistics is shown at the top of your screen. When you tap on this black bar, the wall menu appears giving you the opportunity to mark all articles as read. This means really all articles.

Furthermore, you can mark all articles of a single RSS feed simply by tapping and hold on the feed itself. This open the feed menu where you – again – have the option to mark the articles as read. This works both on iPad and iPhone.

After using News Wall or News Wall Free for some days you probably will have hundreds of articles especially when you use high-volume RSS feeds like engadget.com, 9to5mac.com or gizmodo.com. It can be a lot of work to scroll back to the first article, primarily on iPhone. However, there already is a built-in “jump to the first article” feature: just double-tap the title bar of the feed you want to be moved to the front.

Of course, this works on your iPad as well. This applies both to the free and the paid version.

Sometimes you may want to refresh only one of your RSS feeds. This is much faster than refreshing all your feeds. Doing so is really easy. Tap and hold on the one article of the feed you want to refresh to open up a menu. This menu contains a refresh button.

Feed menu on iPhone

Feed menu on iPad

Please notice that News Wall’s backend system caches feeds for 2 minutes. You will not receive new articles within this time. This applies both to the free and the paid (iPhone & iPad) version.

When you start News Wall or News Wall Free on your iPhone you will notice that there are no images. Because of the much smaller screen of your iPhone compared to an iPad, the app disables images by default. This way, more feeds can be displayed at a time. However, it’s quite simply to activate this feature.
Open the settings screen by tapping on the little (i) at the top-right corner. When you scroll down you will see a switch which enables the view of images.

From now on, the first image of every article is extracted from the RSS stream. News Wall downloads it so it gets stored on your device. Every pictures takes about 20 – 60 kBytes of your memory. Of course, they are deleted when you remove the RSS feed.
This applies both to the free and the paid version.

Apple just approved Paper Pile’s update 1.3. With the focus on stability and interface optimizations it should solve most issues users where reporting. You can see screenshots of this version here.

Most suggestions I received have been integrated. Instapaper support, better full story views and “more images” are just a few of them.

Please feel free to send me your opinion about it.

I just submitted update 1.3 to Apple’s review team. Increasing just the minor version number is kinda understated since there are so many changes and new features. Let me introduce at least some of them.

First, I changed the app’s icon. One user mentioned the old icon might put the idea of a comic style in your mind. And he is right. Dave Day played a bit and came up with a great idea which I used to create the new icon. Dave, thank you. I changed startup images as well so they fit into the new style.
On the subject of style: Paper Pile produces its pages in three different styles called traditional, modern and magazine. I reckon there is no need to explain them in detail – enjoy the screenshots:

Update 1.3 showing page in traditional style

Update 1.3 showing page in magazine style

Maybe you noticed the little gray bar at the top of the screen. This part of the overview part called Dashboard now is always visible. This way you always have access to the refresh button and to the settings view. While refreshing you are now able to cancel the request. Once data was received a progress bar indicates the time until data processing and image downloading will be finished.

When you tap on an article the new article view will appear presenting you the content of the article as simple text, original feed content text and website. You can share the article per mail or send it to Instapaper for later reading. This feature was the most requested

Update 1.3 showing full text

The most important change, however, is the concept pages are displayed and managed. The pages are not arranged side by side anymore. There is only one page at a time which reduces memory consumption dramatically. Swiping to the left shows you older articles in the same section, swiping to the right newer articles. There are areas at the top of each page showing you the previous and next section. You just need to tap on these the jump to the section. Double-tapping on the left/right border works as well.

Besides these explained changed hundreds of little changes and bug fixes are included. So if the problems you experienced are now solved, please update your rating at the App Store. The user’s manual page will get updated once the update was approved by Apple.

I like to thank my testers which did a really great job spending hours reviewing more than 20 builds. So, Dave Day, Lukas, Ingo, Charles, Renaud and all the guys from ipadteam.de, thumbs up!

Feel free to comment these features or suggestions.

Today, Paper Pile exceeded 1000 known feeds. In other words, since Paper Pile is available more than 1000 different feeds have been requested. Some other facts:

• more than 10.000 requests have been handled during the last 7 days
• that’s 1 request per second
• macrumors.com is on top of feed list followed by
• engadget.com at second position
• 5 users are still using version 1.1 (1.2 was released two weeks ago)

Hopefully, you all have fun with your iPad and Paper Pile.

Some users complain about the fact that Paper Pile shortens article texts so they need to open the web view to read the full version.

Firstly, they’re right. It is annoying having to tap, count to 3, tap on “Open…”, wait until the website has loaded.
That’s why the next update introduces a full text view activated just by tapping on the article. You than will have the choice to load the website.

Secondly, there is, somehow, no way other than cut the stories short if necessary. A newspaper’s layout highly depends on filled areas. It just does not look like a newspaper if there are to many emtpy spaces hanging around. To proof my word, I’ll show you a screenshot of the full text articles when using a very famous feed. Most feeds publish their news this way.

Feel free to suggest different way about dealing with these things. I appreciate every single hint.