With July 4th landing on a Thursday my wife and I decided to take Friday off and go on a motorcycle trip to Santa Barbara. It’s a 4 hour drive from Palo Alto, 7 it you take the scenic route, and it’s totally worth it. The city is charming, the food is great and the beach is perfect for long walks.
The key to shipping apps on the side is to always put in the hours, so I worked extra hard the previous weekend, during the week and when returning from the trip today (Sunday). Overall I’m quite happy with how the planning turned out.
Enough rambling, where am I on the NewsWave 2019.6 key features?
OPML Export works like a charm, it’s ready to ship. When you trigger it you’ll get a UIDocumentInteractionController asking what you’d like to do with the file: mail, save to file, open in another app…
OPML Import functionality is there but there’s a couple of things that need fine tuning.
- Progress indicator: in its current form you see a message saying it’s importing feeds but not how many have already been processed vs. total (specially relevant if you’re importing hundreds of feeds).
- Incorrect states: in some rare cases one of the URLSessions fails without a callback, this leads to the UIAlertController “Importing Feeds…” never disappearing as the app believes a feed is still being processed.
- Result logs: I’m conflicted about showing it or not, most apps don’t seem to do it. I’m erring on the side of showing how many have been imported successfully which is what most apps do.
On the “Performance Improvements & Bug Fixes” front, I’ve done several changes that result in reduced peak CPU consumption and tweaked the way saving happens to avoid multithreading racing conditions, now all saving is done in a specific synchronized queue. This will hopefully address a rare bug that could lead to old content mysteriously disappearing from a user device.
The final key feature of 2019.6 is creating a “Default mix of feeds for new users”: I’m not sure if I should automatically subscribe new users to the default mix of feeds -ala NetNewsWire– or give users the option during the on-boarding process. If I show them the option during the on-boarding process a follow up question is, should I give them one “NewsWave” default mix, or a couple of mixes to choose from? Questions, questions…
Until next week,
Marc
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Twitter -> @MarcMasVi | Micro.blog -> @MarcMV