Newspapers 2.1

When I designed FeedDemon 2.0 last year, one of my priorities was to completely overhaul how FeedDemon’s newspapers work.  The first thing I wanted to do was to enable newspapers to be much more interactive, so that you could mark posts as read, flagged, deleted, etc., from within the newspaper.  That goal was accomplished, but I didn’t meet my second goal, which was to split newspapers containing a large number of posts across several pages.

The main reason I wanted to do this was because FeedDemon has always been hampered by the single-page newspaper view.  Overall it worked fine, but things slowed to a crawl when displaying a newspaper containing hundreds of items.  This limited what I could do with the newspaper view, since any new feature I added had to scale to work when displaying hundreds of posts at once.

Well, I’ve been in mad scientist mode again this week, and I’m happy to report that FeedDemon’s newspapers have been completely re-architected to support pagination [screenshot].  As a result, they’re a lot faster and a lot more powerful.  The fact that I no longer have to worry about the performance cost of displaying hundreds of posts has enabled adding some long-needed features, including:

• Highlighting of keywords in watches and subscription searches [screenshot]
• Thumbnail images when showing summaries (excerpts) instead of full posts [screenshot]
• Quick +/- toggle between excerpt and full post [screenshot]

Within the next week we plan to release a beta of FeedDemon 2.1 which includes all of the features mentioned above.  Pagination is a much bigger change than it may sound, and I realize that change can be jarring, so I’m hoping that the improvements are well-received.  I’ll announce the beta here when it’s available.

Update: Critter has been privately testing the pagination features, and he says “the speed improvements are astonishing” :)