[App] RSS Central

Name: RSS Central v1.1

RSS Central is a powerful and easy to use application that can download and display RSS, Atom and RDF news feeds from web sites all over the internet. Its quick multi-download system will bring all the news feeds you want to your fingertips in no time, and will hold on to them so that they can be read even if you lose your internet connection.

RSS Central features an attractive and informative user interface, categorised news feeds, a feed search to discover new news sources, article summary and full web page displays, article search tools, read/unread article tracking, support for international characters, a useful "send to email" feature, portrait and landscape support, plus a whole lot more.

RSS Central's trial mode is fully featured, and just displays occasional "nag" screens while using the application. Please give it a try and see what you think.

Before getting my Windows Phone 7 device, I had an HTC Touch Pro2. One of the applications that came pre-loaded on it was Ilium software's RSS Hub. This rapidly became one of my most-used applications. When I moved to WP7 I tried a number of the RSS apps that were available, but none of them worked in the way I wanted or offered the features that I was looking for.

In true programmer style, instead of compromising with one of the available alternatives, I set about writing my own application. RSS Central is the result. It is functionally inspired by RSS Hub and uses a similar approach to displaying and organising its content. I also used the opportunity to clean up a few of the little annoyances that I found with RSS Hub. I hope you like the end result!.

I intend to continue developing and enhancing RSS Central, so if you have any comments, suggestions, complaints or bug reports, please let me know and I'll see if I can address them in a future version. As you will see from the version history below, I added lots of new things in version 1.1, and most of these were suggestions from people using the app. I have more enhancements lined up, if there's something you think should be added or changed then please let me know and I'll add it to my list.

RSS Central is available now from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Key features:

• Attractive and functional Windows Phone 7-style user interface.
• Streamlined navigation to make using the app as quick and easy as possible.
• Fast application startup to get you straight into your feeds without having to wait.
• Create categories to group your news feeds together for easier browsing.
• Feed search function to help you discover new feeds and news sources.
• Quick display of article summaries, or show the full article content with just one touch.
• Search for keywords within feeds to help you find articles of interest.
• "Minimum refresh time" prevents unnecessary re-downloading of unchanged feeds.
• Automatic tracking of read and unread articles. Choose to hide read articles and read subsciptions if you wish.
• Full support for international character sets.
• Quickly and easily send the details of interesting articles as an email message.
• Full support for portrait and landscape orientation.

Reviews from the Marketplace

• "Best RSS reader on the market, and I have tried most!" -- irdawood
• "Best RSS reader I've seen so far. Worth the price." -- leongustavo
• "Love it. I have tried many news and RSS apps and this is the best one." -- Tusker
• "This app does exactly what's needed, making it easy to add feeds through searching, categorize feeds and HIDE items that have been read. I've tried about 10 other options in the Marketplace, but this is the one you want if you have a large number of feeds or have varied interests that don't correspond to some of the hard-coded readers." -- Mlizardi

Hi the_Crispy,

Thanks for your message and glad you like it.

I tried my best to get nice-looking animations throughout the app and I'm fairly happy with the result. Silverlight does do a very good job providing tools to get them up and running. It's difficult to decide whether to put the animations in or just get the app released though!

Hi libor_m,

It should support whatever encoding the RSS feed specifies -- I spent a fair bit of time working with different encodings to ensure (in particular) that accented characters in non-English feeds displayed correctly.

Can you give me an example of a feed and article that isn't displaying correctly? Then I'll take a look at what's happening.

Thanks,

Thanks for that -- that certainly didn't do what I had expected! Let me see what I can do...

Well that was a bit more effort than I had expected: it seems (unless anyone knows different?) that .NET on WP7 doesn't have any support for decoding windows-1250, hence it falling over.

So I wrote my own decoder. Does this look OK?



This will be included in version 1.2. Not entirely sure when I'll be releasing that yet, probably in the next week or two. I'll post an update to this thread when it's available, so you can subscribe to the thread if you want to be notified.

@BigwaveMx -- thanks, glad you like it! I've not really considered localisation at all at the moment, but it's certainly something I could give some thought to. Are you volunteering to provide the Spanish translations?

@yeahtyeaht -- not at the moment, I'm more interested in keeping this as a stand-alone RSS reader for the time being. Maybe at some stage in the future, but I can't promise. I do hope to offer a feature that would allow feed details to be imported from Google Reader, but that's as far as the integration would go.

Glad it looks good, libor_m

Version 1.2 was submitted to the Marketplace last night, but was rejected after a couple of hours. When I looked at the failure reason, it was completely blank. Nice. Usually it takes several days to even get looked at so I'm hoping this was just a glitch.

I deleted the submission and tried again, and it hasn't been rejected yet, so fingers crossed...

To all of you that have volunteered for translations, many thanks for doing so. I've put "localisation" on to my To Do list, and may well be in touch with you in the near future.

Version 1.2 has finally made it through certification, with the following new features:

* Added context menus for the subscription list. Press and hold one of the subscriptions to display the menu. The menu allows the subscription to be marked as read, marked as unread, refreshed, or edited.
* Added context menus for the article list. Press and hold one of the articles to display the menu. The menu allows articles to be marked as read, marked as unread, sent by email or sent by SMS.
* Added a further minimum update frequency that indicates that the subscription should only be updated manually. These subscriptions will never be included in the update when the Refresh button is pressed on the main subscription list, and are instead individually updated via their context menu.
* Added support for sending article links by SMS.
* Fixed a bug where the article list occasionally jumped back to the top when returning to it after reading an article.
* Added support for reading feeds encoded with Windows-1250 encoding.
* Clicking the "Read more online..." link on the article summary now changes the link text to highlight that it has been clicked. This provides some positive feedback for slow-loading pages.
* A new navigation setting is available to control the back button behaviour on the article page. This can be set to either navigate backwards through the browser history, or to return directly to the article list. If navigating back through the history, a new menu option is available to return directly to the article list to save navigating all the way back.

Hope you like it and as always please let me know if you have any feedback.

Hi libor_m,

Many thanks for the review, much appreciated! Sorry you can't actually get the full version at the moment.

Thanks too for continuing to spot problem feeds and send them over. I've fixed up the blogspot feeds now, they will all work correctly in the next version.

The skrz.cz feed is causing me more problems though. It's managing to download the content fine and it looks quite normal, but .NET is falling over trying to parse it. It's possibly because it says it's UTF-8 encoded but is actually Windows-1250 encoded, but even it I manually change this it still fails. I'll have to keep looking at this one, I'll keep you posted.

Thanks and regards,