News app in action
Last week, the News app was updated to 3.0. This new version is a major rewrite, bringing major improvements to the user interface. In this blog we’ll highlight some of them.
User Interaction
A major theme for changes in version 3 has been a more flexible user interface. Two requests, Do not mark as read on scrolling and Sort order of items optional prompted a rewrite of the core code to allow the flexibility needed to implement them. And indeed, these two made it in as new features. If you skim headlines while scrolling down and want to explicitly mark articles as read, you can disable the automatically ‘mark as read’ action; and if you want to read your comics in the proper order, tell the News app to order the feed oldest-first! Other improvements include:
- The ability to specify custom CSS rules so you can fix up the bad look of some feeds
- Much better compact view with title ellipsis, keep unread button and keyboard shortcut to expand item
- OPML import now uses the feed title if given
- Added create folder form in addition to the subscribe form
But it hasn’t just been features: this improvement for example fixes the distracting changes in placement of the buttons overlaying the feeds. News will work a lot better on mobile devices and there’s a new feed design. Settings have been improved as well and the interface has been cleaned up with many less-used buttons moved into a sub menu. Last but not least, new keyboard shortcuts were introduced and video should now work.
News apps
There is a large number of third party apps which sync with the ownCloud News app. You can find them on our third party apps wiki.
- ownCloud News Reader (Android), open source
- CloudNews (iOS), open source
- News Checker (Chrome extension)
- own News (BlackBerry)
- ocNews (Sailfish OS), open source
- MyWebRSS (Firefox OS), open source, also works as web app
- News (Firefox OS), open source
- FeedMonkey (Firefox OS), open source
- fastReader (Windows Phone), closed source
- a Windows 8 app is in development
- no desktop apps yet, discussion at https://github.com/owncloud/news/issues/509
If you found another app that works with ownCloud News (or any other ownCloud app!) feel free to add them to the wiki!
Get it and contribute
You can get the News app from the app store. You’ll have to download it and install by hand for now, a future version should be installable automatically from the Apps overview in your ownCloud. If you still have installed the Turn Off Code Checker App from a previous version, it is recommended to disable that – a race condition has the potential to delete your config.php file.
To make it easier for developers to contribute to the News app, it now is build with pure JavaScript rather than CoffeeScript. If you want to help test the current branch, you can get it as a zip file or check it out from git:
git clone :owncloud/news.git
Of course, pull requests with fixes and features are very much welcome as well!
