489-3

[Mariano Kamp]

Hi,

not the ICS version, not by a longshot - still work in progress, but a version that contains accumulated stuff.

Because it has been such a long time I will also list some older features of this beta that are not in the released Market version.

- Now using the directory layout as introduced with Android 2.2 for fresh installs.

- Disabling hw acceleration for the article detail view when using the dark theme. This is to avoid the white flashing between articles in feed view.

- Now a tap on the count bubbles on the dashboard directly goes to the article list. (This is experimental, will not be in the official release notes and has its drawbacks. It'll likely not survive the ICS NewsRob version)

- Now checking for "downloadArticlesInParallel" and "downloadImagesInParallel" in newsrob.debug. If they are 0, download will be sequential. (Could you please test that, Alex B and Knowthenazz?)

- The sync/refresh button turns into a circular progress monitor when a sync happens. A side effect of dealing with a layout glitch that happend with the introduction of a recent Android version was that you had to hit exactly the circular progress monitor to show the progress monitor / cancel button. The current version now adds more padding around it, so that it should be much easier to hit it.

Last not least. Syncing of the pinned state. There are two use cases:

Backing up the pinned state to Google Reader, so that when you install NewsRob from scratch, e.g. when installing ROMs, migrating to new phones/tablets.

Using more than one Android device. When you use a phone and a tablet and have really bought into the process to quickly scan headlines, pin the ones you want to read later and then mark the remaining as read, it is very inefficient if on another device you start from scratch.

So now NewsRob syncs the pinned state to Google Reader and does so during a sync as well as in the upload-only/5min sync. 

What sounds so easy was not so easy to implement, but it meanwhile works without a glitch for more than a month on my devices. So I hope it works for you guys too. Please let me know. Because of the way GoogleReader works it needs the exact sync to do it. So you better enable "always use exact syncing". Also be aware that exact syncing only happens at most once an hour. 

So when auto sync is enabled the way up to GR is usually happening 5 minutes after your last state change, the way down happens at most every 60 minutes for articles already existing on the target device. For articles that are just downloaded to the target device for the first time, i.e. new articles, this delay does not apply. This is a consequence of the Google Reader API not being able to offer incremental updates or diffs.

Please watch out for a label "pinned" to show up on the dashboard. This should not happen. 

Here is the apk.

[Mariano Kamp]

I wrote at most every 60 minutes an exact sync can happen. It is 24 minutes though, which should translate to "at most twice per hour".

I also fixed another thing and uploaded the new version. You can use the same link though.

[crgeo...@gmail.com]

Mariano – I installed 4.8.9-3 over 4.8.8 Pro but had some issues. Several times when I turned on the phone I found the sync notification showing. When I switched to NR it was showing that it was syncing but I don’t think it actually was. Also several times when I marked all articles read from a PC browser, NR didn’t mark the articles as read when it did it’s next sync. I didn’t change any of my settings from 4.8.8, and I have Exact Sync enabled. A couple times NR required a force close.

I do like how I can more easily click on the circular progress monitor. Not that I do it a lot but I have had issues with getting that to work with prior versions.

I switched back to 4.8.8 for now but will be happy to test new releases as time permits. Good to see that futures updates are on the horizon again. I tried a few other readers recently when my wife got a new tablet but have had to stick with NewsRob for my phone because nothing else works as good. Looking forward to new enhancements. Keep up the good work!

[Mark Otway]

I'm seeing the same thing - ie the read status of articles isn't syncing back to GR.

Not seen any force closes or erroneous syncing notifications though.

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[Mark Otway]

Note that when I force a full sync GR updates, so it's just the "5 mins after the last article is read" mini-sync that's either not running or not doing anything.

[Henrik Heimbuerger]

The 'hanging' sync notifications I have a lot on 4.8.8 Pro, too. I don't think it's related to the beta. It just happens when Android kicks the progress while a sync is running and the notification therefore doesn't get removed. It's just related to low memory situations due to multitasking a lot.

[Mariano Kamp]

I also think that the hanging sync notification is due to the OS killing NewsRob. Looking at a logfile would help to be a 100% sure. FWIW I cannot think of anything I changed in NewsRob with respect to that issue.

Henrik, it may(!) also be related to the OS/version. Cause it is not happening to me.

I am not aware of any force closes, but of course that could be and would be something I would love to chase down. When NewsRob does run on a force close it opens an email to me with the details of that. Please send this to me then, crgeocycler.

Regarding the upsync. Hmmh, I cannot reproduce it. I tried. Can anybody send me a log file?

[crgeo...@gmail.com]

4.8.9-3 doesn’t run well on my phone. I once again installed it on top of 4.8.8 Pro and at first it wouldn’t run at all (not sure why, but it immediately FCed every time I tried to run it). Restored 4.8.8 using TB, then once again installed 4.8.9-3. What appears to be happening is that NR hangs (or maybe is swapped out by the OS). According to OS Monitor it isn’t consuming any CPU but I see the PID, and the notification icon doesn’t get removed. If I try to open NR either through the notification icon or the widget, the screen either goes completely dark or sometimes it displays the top grey NR horizontal bar but nothing else. If I click either the menu button or the back button, that’s when I see the FC. After the FC, NR will run and shows that it is several hours behind in syncing (if it sat in this state that long).

I cleared cache this time after installing 4.8.9-3 and seeing the issue, but that didn’t seem to help. I haven’t changed any other settings from 4.8.8.

The FC message that I’m getting is:

Sorry!

Activity NewsRob (in

application NewsRob) is not

responding.

[Force Close] [Wait]

I never see a prompt to send an e-mail. I reinstalled 4.8.8. again for now and anticipate it will be okay again.

HTC Desire CDMA

ROM: Oxygen-2.3.2-BravoC

Android: 2.3.7

[Mariano Kamp]

Hi.

A force close usually happens when the app runs on an unexpected error. Usually this is serious. NewsRob would then present you with an email containing relevant info that you would just need to send to me.

Then there are ANRs (Application Not Responding). It happens for background services, which I will not further discuss here and for foreground apps.  When the app in the foreground doesn't respond to a user event (pressing the menu button for example) then an ANR is raised and you are asked if you want to wait longer than the 5 seconds or if you want a hard termination. The latter would then result in the OS creating a force close for the app. 

How can this happen? Either the app is doing things on the main UI thread, which it really shouldn't and NewsRob doesn't, or it is delayed by a bug in the app or a conflict with other apps on the device, e.g. both want to access the same resource at the same time. It could also be that the sync and the UI want to access the database at the same time and I created some kind of a dead lock there. 

It is really strange though that it only happens with 4.8.9-3 for you. Could you please think long and hard if you are a 100% sure? If so, I would like to get a log (please how to enable this in the bit.ly/nr_faq) and also the file "/data/traces.txt". The latter is written by the OS when it kills an app for being unresponsive. In there I can see what NewsRob was doing when the ANR occurred.

Can you do that? Otherwise I don't see how to investigate that.

Btw. The sync-in-progress notification cannot be removed when NewsRob is shut down by the OS with force. If this happened can be seen from the log.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/newsrob/-/ffzb8HjmSrgJ.

[Shahpur]

Hi Mariano,

thats great news! Especially the syncing of the pinned articles was one of my most wanted features.

I tried it out recently on my Nexus 7 and Nexus S. Strangely the pinned state is not synced at all. Its the old behavior where the pinned articles of my Nexus 7 would appear as regular non-pinned articles on my Nexus S.

Do i have to activate some specific setting for it to work?

Bye,
Shahpur

[Mariano Kamp]

no. sorry. the beta is broken and seems to work only for me :-( i will investigate further on the weekend.

Written on a mobile device

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