Start of an Era

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Rod Nayfield

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Jan 23, 2020, 11:41:25 PM1/23/20
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For the last week or two I've been working on the problems with GrazeRSS ... and I've fixed the ones I care about.   

(That means if you use something besides Newsblur, or depend on mobilizers, you might be out of luck).  


If you're technically inclined enough to know how to side-load an APK ... please reach out to my email.

I've still got a few known bugs - but for the last several hours I've been running a new build (coexisting with my existing grazerss install) and haven't felt a need to switch back.  And some stuff that broke with Android 10 (share link / show in browser, menu, log into newsblur the first time) are now fixed.  

I'd love to get some other folks to try it out...  

 



Alan J Robertson

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Jan 24, 2020, 8:35:33 AM1/24/20
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Great news, Rod.  I'm still running Android 9 - happy to test if that was thought useful or are you only looking for those running Android 10?

No issue with side-loading.  I use Newsblur, although have tended to use a mobilizer for Electrek but it wouldn't be the end of the world if webview works as I normally have internet access when checking that one.

Cheers

Alan

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Travis Tabbal

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Jan 24, 2020, 11:36:38 AM1/24/20
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Great to hear. I haven't had a lot of time, so I don't have much done with it. 

If you want to contribute changes at some point, let me know and I'll set it up and publish the update. If not, that's cool too. 

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Rod Nayfield

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Jan 24, 2020, 2:41:49 PM1/24/20
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Unfortunately it's hard to merge, Android Studio import from the old Eclipse-style setup.


There are still a few issues, but the latest release (3.1.2) works well for my use case. 

I'd appreciate anybody who is savvy enough to load the APK that's in the 3.1.2 release on that page to try it out and open issues if they find any.  It probably won't be in the play store for a week now that Google is manually reviewing everything.

It won't conflict with GrazeRSS install,  so you can switch back and forth to see if behavior differs.  (It's called GrazeTEN ... since it's targeting Android 10 API)





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Alan J Robertson

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Jan 25, 2020, 3:36:40 PM1/25/20
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Hi Rod

Have installed GrazeTEN and so far so good 👍👍

As mentioned I'm still on Android 9 but it all seems to be working fine. Have successfully synced with Newsblur (now added the association to LastPass too, which should hopefully be automatically shared with other users).

Mark to keep then using the tick icon to mark the rest of the articles as read (my main use case) worked perfectly. I do Article+Images for most feeds but manually changed Electrek to A+I+SWP without an issue, did refresh content then resynced, all came through nicely. 

I guess the only minor issue now the three dots menu has had to go is the lack of discoverability re long press actions in feed list and articles, but that would probably need a bigger UI revamp so I don't think at all worth doing. Perhaps worth a mention in the Readme? 

Overall looks like a brilliant job!

I'll start using it as my daily version and let you know if any issues crop up. I'm following the Github project too. 

Cheers 

Alan 

Rod Nayfield

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Jan 27, 2020, 1:07:00 AM1/27/20
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Have seen a few folks use the developer apk.   Alan has been brilliant and we've fixed a few bugs this weekend.  

Now that it's in the store I'd love to see some more testing ...

Note there is a random background crash that a few folks have seen once after install but not again. Please use the GitHub issue list to report a (or chime in on an already reported) bug.  




As a side note - my goal was to bump compatability and fix critical bugs so Graze was useable (and installable) on Android 10.  To get a few more years out of it.   Requests for new features (without working code) will likely stall. 

If an issue exists in grazerss (they can be installed side by side) circa Android 7 it's not very interesting to me. 

And we need competent developers - I personally paid a freelancer for nearly all of the tricky bits on this port ... Without pull requests grazeten might not make it until Android 12.







Alan J Robertson

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Jan 27, 2020, 2:51:41 AM1/27/20
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Have been very happy to help :) 

Rod has done some great work and even better a couple of annoying bugs are now squashed! It happily sits aside any existing installation so I've moved over to using it daily without any concerns. 

Now I just need to work out if the Android 10 update for my OP6 is as stable and whether to install it or not! 

Cheers 

Alan 



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Rod Nayfield

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Jan 27, 2020, 1:34:02 PM1/27/20
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If you are using the debug apk from GitHub, I'd ask that you switch to the play store version once 3.1.5 rolls out.   

The "not allowed in background" crash seems to be related to background sync not working.  

From the app store reporting, I can see that it's happening a lot more than folks notice when the notification comes up. 

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Nelson RICCIARDI Parente

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Jan 27, 2020, 10:29:27 PM1/27/20
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That is great news. Thanka for doing it. 

So am I right to assume the new build will not work with Feedly? 


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Rod Nayfield

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Jan 27, 2020, 10:38:07 PM1/27/20
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Hasn't been tested but the fix to auth for newsblur wasn't newsblur specific.

It should be easy to test - download (it won't hurt your grazerss install in any way) change your reader in prefs and hit sync.

For newsblur this prompts for user/pass then syncs. 

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Nelson RICCIARDI Parente

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Jan 27, 2020, 11:16:05 PM1/27/20
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Happy to test it.

Where should I go to download it? 

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Nelson RICCIARDI Parente

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Jan 28, 2020, 12:14:28 AM1/28/20
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Getting an error of Feedly login.

Attached 
Screenshot_20200128-001236_GrazeTEN.jpg

Travis Tabbal

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Jan 28, 2020, 11:19:58 AM1/28/20
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Feedly won't work with this version. They are VERY picky about their API and require a key I'm not allowed to share. There's an NDA and everything. Mariano and I are the only ones allowed to have it. It's unfortunate, but it's not my call. I've been looking at the changes, and the biggest hangup with merging seems to be related to the Eclipse stuff. That platform is deprecated anyway, so I'm leaning toward dropping it and using the currently preferred Android Studio. Once I do that, Google will change it, but hey, it's what Google does. :) 

Once I get the merge done I can post an APK that will work with Feedly. If I don't worry about conflicts with Eclipse, it shouldn't be too difficult to pull the changes over. Many thanks to Rod for taking the time to do it. 



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Rod Nayfield

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Jan 29, 2020, 9:31:39 PM1/29/20
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Travis,

My advice:

You have to make the jump to Android Studio.  At a minimum, I don't think any of the Eclipse-based build tools can output the new bundle format that the play store prefers these days.  I'm sure they'll change it in the future - but it definitely feels like a decade-newer development environment.  And while I'm not certain, I would be surprised if the AVD (android virtual device) support is as good in eclipse.

Moving from eclipse to Android Studio / IntelliJ / Gradle is a big codebase refactor - moving nearly all the files around, refactoring references - plus moving to gradle.   And, of course, it's obviously preferable to have a complete history in git.  But it would take a lot of work to cleanly commit all of the operations to move from one to the other.   The desire for that continuity hung me up for a while. Until I realized that the problem wasn't in the critical path:  The first commit in the GrazeTen repo is the result of 'Import' into Studio of the last commit of GrazeRSS.  The missing link could be filled in today or two years from now -   and the only benefit is that it makes life easier for a developer who can see the entire history of a piece of code without switching contexts.

And that points out the real challenge.  In the last two weeks, I've done four or five releases of GrazeTen, modernized the code base to meet my needs, triaged several issues and crashes, etc ... But I'm not an android/java developer - I'm just a maintainer.  Except for a few simple fixes, most of the work was done by a freelancer that I hired at my own expense.

But there's plenty of work that still needs to be done - things I don't know how to fix, even if I could test and package.   The best example is the background sync - see issue #16 in github - not only does background sync not work at all - but has caused several hundred crashes (silent to the user) with under a dozen registered apps.   That code needs to be refactored to the modern job scheduler.      Widgets are broken, mobilizer code seems to be hanging ...   There's a few more crash reports that I haven't even triaged yet.


My point is ... if you've got a limited amount of time to spend ... assess the bang for the buck - and don't die on the hill of making a commit-perfect code repository. 

-rod










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Alan J Robertson

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Jan 30, 2020, 3:39:07 AM1/30/20
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Hi Travis

I hadn't realised you were planning to continue with developing GrazeRSS. Are you going to incorporate the fixes that Rod has made in GrazeTEN? If so should we start adding any bugs to a Github for GrazeRSS (if there is one?). Either way really glad to see things moving and grateful to Rod for helping kick start the move to Android 10.

Cheers 

Alan 


Travis Tabbal

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Jan 30, 2020, 11:50:28 AM1/30/20
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I am planning to at least package it with the Feedly API key so that people can use that service. I would like to get back into it, it's a little difficult for me as real life is a bit crazy right now. I should have another project wrapped up in the next couple of days though, and that will free up some time. The issues Rod mentioned are things that I worried might be problematic on a newer API level. The code was originally designed for Android 2.x IIRC. I remember using it on my G1. Switching to newer versions is always a bit tricky and there are always little issues here and there even between different manufacturers on the same Android version. We've been fortunate that, for the most part, things worked well for this long. It's amplified by the move to building against the newer API code, which is required by Google. I also can't test on 10 without the emulator, which is a bit frustrating. I really wish someone would release a phone I want to buy. My new desktop should help there, at least the emulator won't lag so much. 





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Ezequiel Martín Cámara

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Jan 31, 2020, 6:20:37 AM1/31/20
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Hello, all,

Great to see some movement here!

I am installing GrazeTEN and giving it a try.

Any quick guides on how to get a development environment going? I would like to try my hand... There are a couple enhancements that I would love to have.

Thanks,
Ezequiel Camara
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Rod Nayfield

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Jan 31, 2020, 2:40:48 PM1/31/20
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It's massively easy 


1. Download Android studio and install it
2. Install git for Windows

You can then start studio and pick the option to import a project from vcs - paste the GrazeTen.git url (https) from the "clone" button in GitHub.

Once it clones the repo it's one button to compile and launch the app on an emulator.  

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Alan J Robertson

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Feb 29, 2020, 1:20:20 AM2/29/20
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I've noticed that the GWT wireless transcoder is now bringing some articles back as multipage. The overall appearance is better (with images showing now) but would there be a way to either get all the pages viewable offline or get them onto one page? 

Alan

Sean McCabe

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Mar 30, 2020, 10:44:07 AM3/30/20
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Hey Travis -

I just got a new phone and stumbled across the need to move to GrazeTEN.  Any update on getting a version with the Feedly key?
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