26th
Google Reader Update [2]
Google Reader has almost been ported. The features that work:
- General feed syncing (i.e., whatever is in the currently available public build)
- Friends’ shared posts (new feature)
- Starred folder (new feature)
- Shared folder (new feature)
It’s fast. I’ve benchmarked it against a few other Google Reader clients and we’re by far the most efficient. A delta update where you have a small number of new unread feeds takes only 40-80KB while other implementations use upwards of 1MB. The savings are going to be even bigger if you subscribe to more feeds.
There’s another issue associated with Google Reader - the Starred folder. After I asked you, how you use starred items, two patterns emerged:
- Starred used as a way to read articles at a later point and then un-starring the posts in question. The starred folder grows / shrinks.
- Starred used as a way to bookmark posts. The starred folder only ever grows.
If we want to keep the starred folder in full synchronization, the second usage scenario poses two problems:
- Memory usage will only ever increase due to the starred folder
- Huge amounts of data would have to be transferred on each refresh
That’s the reason why I’ve included a setting to control the behavior of the starred folder - you can either set it to fully sync the starred folder or not. For people who have a relatively low amount of starred items, full sync will pose no performance / network bandwidth problems. For everyone else, the default (off) should work for you well.
Testing
I’ve outlined rough timeframes at the bottom of a previous post but I’ve changed my mind on a particular aspect. The timeframes are still accurate with regards to the public release but I also plan to release a working build of the new generation EventBox as soon as I can. Here’s the catch:
- It will only feature a couple of services (Twitter, OneRiot, Reddit, Google Reader)
- Some features will be missing
- Updates will be released very often
- It will have bugs
You will be able to run the build alongside the current release without any data interference. I’d really appreciate it if some brave people would be test it out. I’ll be releasing more information regarding the details in the future.
