ttrss-reader, an Android client

[fox]

Finaly installed it on my Desire. All in all works nicely, great job there.

Several things I have noticed:

1. Can you somehow disable the suggestion thing HTC keyboard does when typing in the URL to tt-rss installation? Maybe mark the input box as an URL? Not sure how does that work, but I had to fight with the keyboard a little bit there.

2. When opening a feed, it shows "Nothing to display" while the spinning thingie is going and it seems to be loading data. Maybe it should display a loading prompt instead.

3. For some reason, back button behaves strangely for me. I click on Fresh articles, click on the article, click back and go back into Fresh articles but the feed is empty and "Nothing to display" is shown. Afterwards, "Nothing to display" is shown until I manually refresh the feed.

4. Personally I'd like to request being able to switch between category view and plain feed list view on the fly. Also, if possible, it would be really great to see actual feed icons in the reader.

5. Can't seem to open Published feed, getting the "I can't connect to your tt-rss instance" error. Might be some API problem there?

6. It would be great to see Labels category and contents, also being able to label articles through the reader (needs API support).

[nils.braden]

@iss: Thanks, i am relieved! :)

@fox: Wow, thats a lot of things. Thanks for the suggestions! Some comments:

1. Disabling suggestions is possible. I had no problem with it cause i use SwiftKey and it suggests me the right URL once i entered it manually so its perfect. I think the keyboards with auto-correction should have an easier way to turn that off just for a short time. Will be changed.

2. Perhaps i should change the message and make it a bit bigger, something like "Loading data". I didnt want to block the UI with a progress-bar because of the menu-buttons which are accessible.

3. + 5. Fresh articles and Published Articles are features i rarely use, havent spent much time on them yet ^^

4. Hm, i havent got a plain feed-view yet, all feeds are displayed only below their category. Does the API provide a way to get all feeds at once, without respect to their category? Then it would probably be a nice and easy to implement feature. Else i think i would have the same problem as with the getArticles-Method, i would have to fetch everything without respect to whats going to be displayed in the end.
On the favicon-thing someone started to work but never finished. Came to a halt at some style and resizing problems i think: https://code.google.com/p/ttrss-reader- ... tail?id=18

6. Haven't used labels yet...

[fox]

I *think* you should be able to get a list of all feeds if you pass a null value to cat_id parameter of getFeeds API method. Which is actually a bug since there's no way to get to Uncategorized category (it has null cat_id). Dang.

Well, that is now fixed in trunk and should work as outlined here: http://tt-rss.org/redmine/wiki/tt-rss/J ... e#getFeeds

Shame on the icons thing.

[prrawls]

This actually works pretty well, however these are the bugs I've seen so far on my HTC incredible Android Version V2.2.

On Fresh Articles - and published only.
When I turn the phone I have refresh the articles becuase they disappear - Need to force a refresh.
When I open a article to read then go back to feed lists its empty - Need a force a refresh.
When the phone sleeps the articles disappear - need to force a refresh.

The Need to force a refresh doestake a bit but that could just be my connection speed.

Thanks again for this APP. Is there a iPhone version in the works?

[nils.braden]

On Fresh Articles - and published only.
When I turn the phone I have refresh the articles becuase they disappear - Need to force a refresh.
When I open a article to read then go back to feed lists its empty - Need a force a refresh.
When the phone sleeps the articles disappear - need to force a refresh.

The Need to force a refresh doestake a bit but that could just be my connection speed.

Hm, thats strange. I suppose you are using TTRSS-Reader 0.7.3 (from the market) and Tiny Tiny RSS 1.4.3? If this is not the case you should try to update to these versions as they *should* work best at the moment.

Else you can try to acquire the log from aLogcat (from the market) or if you got the SDK installed via "adb logcat" on a terminal when connected to you PC. Perhaps there are some hints to what is going on.

Thanks again for this APP. Is there a iPhone version in the works?

As far as i know, no it isn't. Haven't done any iphone-programming yet and got no iPhone so this is left to someone else to do :)

Greetings,
nils

[brookssw]

Hey there,

I've been trying to get the client working for a while now, and even after recently upgrading to 1.4.3.1, I'm not having any luck with getting it working. The error message I'm getting is:

End of input at character 0 of , Method: getJSONResponse(String url)

I have API access enabled... any ideas?

P.S. let me know if there's any logs I can pull that would help with diagnosing the problem

-Sebastian

[nils.braden]

Hi brookssw,

first of all, which version is your client? Did you install from market (recommended) or from the project-page?

To accquire logs you can use aLogcat (from the market) or if you got the SDK installed type "adb logcat" on a terminal when the phone is connected to your PC. Perhaps there are some hints to what is going on. You should see some URLs in the log-output, something like https://www.yoursite.de/api/?op=getArti ... e_id=23278, you can try to copy the exact URL and open it in your browser on the PC to see if the result of the API looks ok (should be JSON-objects).

Greetings,
nils

[fox]

Tried the reader one more time, a few things I've noticed:

1) Can't open fresh feed, it says no articles Could be an API bug?
2) Is it possible to scale pictures automatically to width by default? E.g. this isn't really all that useful: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cthulhoo/5366911934/

I can pinch to zoom and it works nicely but it zooms the text out too, so it's either see the picture or text which is somewhat annoying since I have to zoom in/out all the time.

(Yes getting my camera is easier than doing screenshots using ddms lol)

3) When I enter a feed, it says "No articles" while loading, maybe you could change that to something like "Loading, please wait..." - I'm a bit anal about this sort of thing, I guess.

4) Can you make the text column be aligned to page width, not to the left?

[fox]

Other than that, all around solid improvement from the last time I've used it. Great job! Now we need to improve the speed, since over wifi it seems slower than using mobile version.

[nils.braden]

Tried the reader one more time, a few things I've noticed:

1) Can't open fresh feed, it says no articles :( Could be an API bug?
2) Is it possible to scale pictures automatically to width by default? E.g. this isn't really all that useful: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cthulhoo/5366911934/

I can pinch to zoom and it works nicely but it zooms the text out too, so it's either see the picture or text which is somewhat annoying since I have to zoom in/out all the time. :)

(Yes getting my camera is easier than doing screenshots using ddms lol)

3) When I enter a feed, it says "No articles" while loading, maybe you could change that to something like "Loading, please wait..." - I'm a bit anal about this sort of thing, I guess.

4) Can you make the text column be aligned to page width, not to the left? :)

Hi,

1. But you do have fresh articles in the account you are connected to? Strange. I try to request the preference for FRESH_ARTICLE_MAX_AGE and if that fails the default of 24h is used. When you open fresh articles there should be some log-Output on the console, can you try to call the URL that is printed there in your browser to see if the API-call is OK?
2. As far as I see this would only be possible by fiddling with the images with JavaScript and this would mean I had to inject JavaScript into every content that is displayed. Would be quite a hack i guess. What I think would be possible is to change the font-size by pressing a menu-button or sth. like that. Can't have any more "flinging" cause theres the scrolling and switching articles already...
3. Should work, not tested yet but will be in the next market-version :)
4. What exactly do you mean, which column? A column in the gui, with icons or somethink in the display of an article?

Greetings,
nils

[fox]

1. This console you speak of. I don't think I have it.

2. That's a shame. I thought since you were rendering HTML anyway you could've set some user CSS rules, like img { max-width : 98%; } or something and it would scale automagically, just like in tt-rss proper.

3. Thanks!

4. I mean the whole article panel with text and pictures, in the photo above. Is it possible to basically set text-align: justify for it? I think it would look better.

[nils.braden]

1. This console you speak of. I don't think I have it. :oops:

Just type "adb logcat" while connected via USB. If you want to see only log-output from ttrss you can apply filters like "adb logcat '*:s ttrss:v'"

2. That's a shame. I thought since you were rendering HTML anyway you could've set some user CSS rules, like img { max-width : 98%; } or something and it would scale automagically, just like in tt-rss proper.

Hm i must admit that i really don't know much about what exactly happens when i do stuff in HTML, just the rough picture. This suggestion actually works, I didn't know it could be that easy. Problem is though, you cannot zoom into images anymore. Perhaps i can inject this CSS and remove it once the user presses the zoom-button (you can get notified if he does)? That way it would all fit the screen and still be possible to zoom, wouldn't it?

4. I mean the whole article panel with text and pictures, in the photo above. Is it possible to basically set text-align: justify for it? I think it would look better. :)

Ah, i see. That's no problem at all since I will anyway be fiddling with injected CSS ;)

[fox]

I'll check the adb thing later.

Perhaps i can inject this CSS and remove it once the user presses the zoom-button (you can get notified if he does)? That way it would all fit the screen and still be possible to zoom, wouldn't it?

Maybe show the picture in full screen or zoom in/out when you click on it?

[nils.braden]

Hm i must admit that i really don't know much about what exactly happens when i do stuff in HTML, just the rough picture. This suggestion actually works, I didn't know it could be that easy. Problem is though, you cannot zoom into images anymore. Perhaps i can inject this CSS and remove it once the user presses the zoom-button (you can get notified if he does)? That way it would all fit the screen and still be possible to zoom, wouldn't it?

Damn. Here we are with the problems I saw yesterday. When images got "height" defined and i set max-width only the width is scaled so the images are rammed (word from dictionary, sounds strange. should express that the images are scaled only in one direction, so the aspect ratio is gone). I could run through all img-Tags and remove height-attributes... ^^
Or is there any easy solution? How did you manage that in the Webinterface?

[fox]

Hmm, I think sanitize_rss() removes unnecessary attributes like those.

rammed

Squished?