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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As you might see, some things changed here. First you probably noticed the new layout. I took one of TopWPThemes.com‘s great themes, changed a piece of code here and there and paired it with a brand-new WordPress 3. In the end, I am pretty sure you gonna like it.
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.
Final tests for a new RSS feed reader app for iPhone and iPad just started. It was designed to support skimming so that users with a lot of new articles can find really important things as fast as possible.
It will be submitted for review soon, hopefully it is available when iPad launches internationally. Read more about News wall here.
