The update is available as free and paid version for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

I am really excited what you will think of it.

• new article style combining images and text
• advanced article reading view with next/previous buttons
• completely rewritten feed fetching core
• really fast feed loading
• improved feed reading so nearly every feed can be used
• search feeds by keywords

News Wall Free now runs both on the iPhone and the iPad. It displays ads and has some limitations when it comes to social sharing.

The update will hit the App Store during the next day. Feel free to contact me (you can do this directly in the app now).

During the next weeks, Paper Pile will get a new feed fetching core which is incredible fast. It will debut as part of the next News Wall update in a few days.

The Domain Name System is responsible for IP address / hostname translations. When the app tries to contact the backend it connects to the host danielkbx.com. A DNS server translates the name “danielkbx.com” to the IP address 188.40.86.71. Without a working DNS service the app cannot resolve the IP address and therefore a connection is not possible.

You will notice that the size of each article was decreased so you can see more articles on a single screen. Furthermore, writing the title of an item “into” to image of the articles again saves even more space. In my opinion, readability does not suffer. Please tell me what you think about this little change. If there are no complains I will submit this as an update on Wednesday. Of course, this update will include some other bug fixes. So tell me, if there is something that could be done better.

After July, 12th the price will be $2.99.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

First, you need to get a nice sound sample. There are some websites providing clicks and dings and dongs and swuuushes. I love www.oringz.com because the sounds are great and free (it’s always nice to tell author what you gonna do with his work). Place the mp3 file somewhere in your project so it will get in your bundle.

Now to the coding part. Add another framework called “AVFoundation” to your project. It includes the class we will use. Now you need to decide where you want to invoke the playback. I mostly take the main view controller where I import the AVFoundation headers:

#import <AVFoundation/AVFoundation.h>

An instance variable holds the sounds so we do not need to re-create it every time we want to play it:

AVAudioPlayer *newMessageAudioPlayer;

To actually play the sound, we need a little method doing the dirty work:

-(void)playNewMessagesNotification {
	if (newMessageAudioPlayer == nil) {
		NSURL *audioFile = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"notification1" ofType:@"caf"]];
		newMessageAudioPlayer = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:audioFile error:NULL];
	}
	[newMessageAudioPlayer play];
}

The dirty work done here isn’t dirty at all. It checks if the audio player does exist and of not it creates it by passing a NSURL holding the mp3 filename from the bundle. After creating (or not creating) the player itself it simply starts the playback.

Finally we need to clean up. There are two things to consider. Of course, the instance variable needs to be releases when the class itself gets deallocated. And you should be aware of the memory the sound occupies when hanging around as instance variable. Lucky us, we can easily release the sound in cases of low memory since the play method re-creates it if necessary. So add this to the view controllers didReceiveMemoryWarning method:

[newMessageAudioPlayer release];
newMessageAudioPlayer = nil;

You probably did not notice the new URL. Nevermind, the old one does work as well.

Since I learned that every blog post must include a nice picture I’ll finish this post with a screenshot of – guess what – a screenshot of the new page. Kinda weird.

What is it all about

News Wall reads RSS feed so you have the choice which content you want to use. Every feed is displayed as a scrollable row containing the feed’s items side-by-side. These rows can be collapsed so the display space is used in the most efficient way.

Share what you like

While reading your news you can easily share them via Twitter or e-mail. Furthermore, articles can be saved using Instapaper and Read It Later.
Of course, URL shortening via Bit.ly is supported as well. You even can hook up your own Bit.ly account so you keep track of the clicks.

Be prepared

News Wall runs both on iPhone and iPad requiring iOS 3.2 or higher. It supports Fast App Switching on iOS4 and the Retina Display of the iPhone 4.

Feature Overview

• Read and manage RSS feeds
• User interface optimized for fast reading and skimming
• Auto-discovery of feed address, integrated search to find feeds
• Instapaper support
• Read It Later support
• Twitter support
• Bit.ly URL shortening support
• No Internet connection needed to read on the move

Compare Free/Paid

Stay tuned

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