Archive for September, 2009

RSS Viewer: Help Us Rate Our Application

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

If you are a fan of (or even if you are not as we encourage constructive criticism), help us by rating and/or submitting a review in the App Store. Not only does this benefit ourselves in helping to make a better application by knowing what you are most interested in or dislike the most, but it also benefits other users wanting to know more about the application. If you have a blog or other review on an external site, let us know so that we can link to it.

To create a review now, simply click here to launch iTunes to our application page.

Thanks!

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Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Helpful article to handle IE6 when you have to.

Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs.

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RSS Viewer Down (Now Back Up) for Maintenance

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

We are going down for maintanence at 8:00 AM EST and should be back up by 10:00 AM EST. Bear with us as we improve performance and reliability.

[Update 9:00 AM EST] We are back up and running with some initial performance improvements. Notably, the recent items should load much faster. If you continue to see problems or are unable to login, drop us a note at info@znetdevelopment.com so we can further research the issue. We hope to have more updates and improvements in place tomorrow that should improve performance even more. Thanks for bearing with us.

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RSS Viewer Performance Issues

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Some of you are noticing severe performance issues and lag time (and possibly some error alert messages) when using RSS Viewer. Unfortunately, our expectations have been exceeded and we are diligently working to improve the server response times and reliability. We expect to have some initial work complete tomorrow that should improve performance and will also be scaling out more over the coming days to really improve performance. As the issues reside at the server level the application will not require an update and you will quickly notice improvements.

If you have other comments, bugs, or suggestions for a future release, drop us a note. We always welcome input, especially criticism. It’s what helps to drive us to do better and meet your needs.

Also, if you are satisfied with the application, make sure to rate the application or add a review in the App Store.

Thanks,
RSS Viewer Development Team

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Test RSS Viewer for Feed Compatibility

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Want to check to make sure your favorite feeds are available before purchasing RSS Viewer (Push) for the iPhone? We now have the ability to search for your feeds and view what feeds are available. We will over time extend this functionality to make it even more accessible.

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Need Foreign Language Testers for RSS Viewer

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

We have been very surprised by the amount of non-English speaking users who have downloaded our application. Unfortunately we have not had time to address or test many of the foreign languages. We are now working on improving our support there to meet the demand. If you are interested in helping us beta test foreign language support and speak English, let us know and introduce yourself at info@znetdevelopment.com. We will get back to you with beta support information if we need your help.

Thanks,
RSS Viewer Development Team

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RSS Viewer - Adding Feeds

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Some users have asked about how feeds are added, why some feeds fail, etc. Feeds may be added in one of three ways:

First, if you enter an address or URL to a website, RSS Viewer will attempt to find any defined RSS links defined in the page header (via the <link …> tags). If any links are found, it will parse those links and return the list of all discovered links. You may then pick one of those links. If no links are found, then no results are returned. Remember that not all pages define their RSS feeds even though they may have RSS feeds.

Second, you may enter a URL directly to the feed. RSS Viewer will then attempt to discover the feed and return it if valid. If the feed cannot be found or parsed, then no results are returned. We are constantly improving our parsers, detection, and support, so if a feed does not work today, try again tomorrow or send us a note at info@znetdevelopment.com. We will try to resolve all broken feeds within one day. We receive notifications when sites fail to parse, so that we may continually improve and fix issues.

Third, you may enter a keyword and it will search for any RSS feed with a title or description containing that keyword. As more and more feeds are added to the system, this detection will work better and better.

If you are still unable to add a feed you believe should be working, please drop us a note and we will get back to you as soon as possible (within a day usually) and resolve the issue.

Thanks,
Z|NET Development Team
info@znetdevelopment.com

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RSS Viewer for the iPhone Now Available

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

RSS Viewer (Push) for the iPhone is now available in the Apple App Store. This is the first release but supports Push Notifications for all your favorite sites. We are already hard at work on the next versions that will feature the following improvements:

  • Google Reader synchronization and support
  • Dynamic Keyword support to receive notifications when any feed contains certain text
  • Friends support to view your friends’ feed, send feeds to your friends, and subscribe to friends’ feeds
  • Sharing support to share feeds with a variety of sources including email, friends, digg, twitter, etc
  • Private feeds that support simple authentication and are hidden from all users including friends
  • Special landscape support for easier viewing of articles in newspaper style
  • Much, much more to come. Feel free to send us your favorite requests

We hope you enjoy the application and make sure to rate the application in the iTunes store!

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Apple Denies RSS Viewer Over Favicon Usage

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

We at Z|NET Development, LLC have created one of the first push enabled RSS applications for the iPhone (RSS Viewer (Push)) and was supposed to be released last week. That is until Apple’s approval process decided to claim that favicons were an infringement of the Apple icon. As a feature to RSS Viewer we display the favicon of the root domain of the feed URL next to the relevant feed entries. This provides an easy to visualize and use interface improving usability and awareness (something we felt Apple would appreciate). However, because of the Apple favicon usage next to “Apple Hot News” feeds, Apple denied the application stating “We’ve reviewed RSS Viewer (Push) and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because of an Apple trademark image. We want to remind you of the importance of following Apple’s posted Guidelines for Using Apple’s Trademarks and Copyrights: <http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/guidelinesfor3rdparties.html>“. The last time we checked, all major browsers displayed favicons without issue and even some RSS readers do as well. So the question we ask is how is our application any different? What do you think? Is Apple once again in the wrong or are we just being picky?

We have, since the rejection, replied to Apple twice stating our opinions and asking for clarifications. Three full business days later we still have yet to hear back on any account…not even a friendly status update. Apple continues to operate in its blackhole without much to any helpful support. Meanwhile, our application continues to sit unreleased. Further, if favicons really can be considered trademark infringement, then how can Apple display favicons from websites saved to the iPhone home screen? Is that not an infringement? Should we all not demand royalty fees for each sold iPhone?

Send us your comments on what you think. Meanwhile here’s to hoping we get this resolved soon and our application released.

RSS Viewer Screenshot

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Push RSS via RSS Cloud

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

RSSCloud is a built-in mechanism for the RSS protocol that allows clients to immediately receive updates when new content becomes available. This results in immediate notification rather than polling every hour. Our new iPhone application, RSS Viewer, has had a plan to begin supporting RSS Cloud as soon as servers started offering it. Well, that wait will soon be over. As noted on the Wordpress.com blog, all blogs served by Wordpress.com will have RSSCloud enabled. That means that the RSS Viewer servers that power the RSS Viewer application on the iPhone will be able to connect directly to these feeds and immediately provide updates to your iPhone. In other words, when a new post appears on Wordpress.com (or any other RSSCloud based server), within seconds you will be notified on your iPhone. No more waiting for a few minutes before you get the notification. When a post is added, the RSSCloud system immediately pushes the notification to the RSS Viewer servers which immediately pushes the notification to your iPhone via RSS Viewer.


We hope to have RSS Viewer released this week for the iPhone. As RSSCloud is a server-based feature, we will hopefully have support for it within two weeks.

We have just launched support for RSSCloud and Wordpress.com enabled sites. Check out the video below.

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