As announced News Wall 2.0 is currently rolling-out to App Stores around the world. Enjoy the experience with the great new user interface, feed search and really fast downloads.

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

News Wall major update 2.0 will be available for download December 9. It brings a revamped interface, much faster downloads, feed search and much more. Both the free and the paid version do work on iPhone and iPad now.

I am really excited what you will think of it.

Update 1.3.2 of Paper Pile fixed a connection bug and introduced a little error which caused the app to set all article release dates to January 1st, 1970 which of course messed up the page layout. Luckily, I could fix this without creating an app update. So have fun with it now.

Major update 2.0 of News Wall for iPhone and iPad has been submitted to Apple’s review team. Even though it is the first update of the app it deserves being a major update. Here are the most important changes:

• 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).

Apple just approved Paper Pile’s update to version 1.3.2. Running on iOS 4.2 the app crashes when trying to fetch new stories. This update fixes the issue.

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.

After updating your iPad to iOS 4.2 you’ll notice that Paper Pile crashes when updating feeds. This happens because of a bug at the XML-RPC framework the app uses. I’ll fix this and submit the update to Apple as soon as possible. I apologize for the time you cannot use Paper Pile.

Some user suggested some changes on News Wall user interface. After testing it on my devices I am sure this is a good idea. I made screenshots of an iPhone showing the new arrangement both in portrait and landscape mode.

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 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.

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.