Download vs. Display

[Richard Cohen]

Hey all,

Love Newsrob, etc, would happily pay for it etc :)

One thing which has confused me recently - I'm not sure if the
behaviour changed, or if I'm missing something - regarding the
download and display options. I can set a global option to download
just headers, feed contents, feed contents+mobile web, or feed contents
+web page. I can set a per-feed option to display the feed or the web
page as default, obviously tapping the feed item title bad to switch.
What I can't find is an option to set the global display preference to
feed or web. I'm sure it used to default to feed, and that changed
sometime in the past couple of releases.

What I want to do is - when I have wifi, but that's not really
relevant - download the feed contents and mobile web, but view the
feed by default. That way, I can skim through my feeds without having
to render each item as a web page, but the (mobile) page is cached on
the phone for easy viewing. An obvious use of this would be on a
plane (by co-incidence, I've got a flight tomorrow) or similarly long
boring off-line situation. Frankly, I've got lots of storage (16GB SD
card) and sometimes lots of bandwidth, and I'd like to use them both.
As I said, I'm sure that this is how things used to work, and with a
little manual tweaking of a few individual feeds, it was a nearly
perfect way to browse lots of feeds :)

Cheers
Richard

[Shahpur]

But if you have already cached the webpages, why would you still want
to display the feed only by default?

It's not like opening a CACHED webpage in NewsRob is slow, therefore i
don't see the reason for displaying feed-only if the webpage is cached
and immediately available.

And you can already decide which topics are relevant for you by
reading the topics, so there isn't a need to open every webpage if you
are not interested to read every article.

Bye,
Shahpur

[Mariano Kamp]

Hey Richard,

  true I don't provide a global default for the display type. I thought about this, but then decided against it, because it's just one configuration too many that I didn't consider pulling it's own weight and being to complicated. The user's thinking would need to be very nested to understand that. This wouldn't be an issue for programmers, but for people who don't program I consider this too complicated. It would also be more inconsistent.

  Regarding the change of behavior, you're right. Before it was "broken". When choosing "feed content + mobile web page" the default behavior for display type would need to be to show the mobile web page on display. I didn't check for that in my code and I didn't realize that, because on my phone I use "feed content" as default. Anyway, now that a user reported this issue I fixed it and it's more consistent now. But you are not the first to complain about the change ;-)

  Now adding another global configuration option would make the display type options more inconsistent and complicated. Currently we have those options "feed", "web", "as download type". At least I would need to add "use global default". And would that be the default? That would mean that every feed that I set to a different download type than the default would need an adjustment of the display type, if it not also is the global default. This breaks locality for this setting.

  I hope you understand.

  Btw. the rendering of the mobile web page is really fast in my opinion. You feel differently? Also you can already read the header when the rendering starts, so that I, personally, use this to quickly scan through my articles.

Cheers,
Mariano

[laarka]

I just want to chip in with a "me too". I also miss this feature, for
the exact same reasons.

I'd suggest these options:

GLOBAL

Download
- feed
- mobile+feed
- page+feed

View
- download (xxx) - xxx=feed/mobile/page - changes depending on whats
selected above
- feed
- mobile
- page

PER FEED

Default view
- global default
- feed
- mobile
- page

When/if you introduce this the new option GLOBAL DISPLAY would default
to "as download". No behaviour would change in the program.

How about that?


Lars