Posts Tagged ‘RSS’

RSS Viewer: What’s New

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

As some of you may have noticed, this week we rolled out a new updated server base. While this does not bring you any client side updates (that will be coming soon as we are actively working on completing our next set of enhancements), it does bring you some other notable updates:

  • Feeds are now crawled more often resulting in quicker updates to you and less simultaneous updates
  • Push notifications more actively and correctly reflect your latest news so that when you login you see the latest news
  • Push notifications now lists the site for the particular item
  • Push notifications now show both items when two items are pushed simultaneously
  • Push notifications now include the number of new articles per site rather than an overall total when three or more updates occur
  • Performance and reliability of the server has been dramatically improved.  Logging in should be faster, viewing recent items should be faster, viewing articles for a site should be faster, viewing a particular article should be faster, updating your settings, searching, adding sites, etc should all be faster.  All in all, everything is just faster letting you get more done in a faster time

As always if you notice any issues or uncover a possible bug, let us know right away so we can quickly resolve it.

Thanks

RSS Viewer

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Posted in Software | 6 Comments »

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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Posted in CSS, Software | No Comments »

RSS Viewer Demo

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

[Update Sept 17, 2009] RSS Viewer is now available in the App Store

In anticipation of the soon to be released RSS Viewer application for the iPhone featuring Push RSS, I have uploaded a video demoing some of the features of the application. Check it out including a highly anticipated that will be launched soon after the first release (hint: its Google Reader synchronization!)

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Posted in Software | 8 Comments »

Coming Soon to iPhone: Push RSS

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

[Update Sept 17, 2009] RSS Viewer is now available in the App Store

We have officially released our new RSS Viewer application to the App Store for approval. RSS Viewer brings for one of the first times Push RSS directly to your iPhone or iPod Touch. No longer do you have to periodically check your favorite sites. RSS Viewer aggregates all your favorite feeds and immediately notifies you of new articles. The application also provides an easy to use interface for viewing all your feeds. Check out the official product page here: http://znetdevelopment.com/znet/iphone.html.

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Posted in Software | 1 Comment »