Byline is a Google Reader client for iPhone. Google Reader is a RRS subscription platform.
I have been waiting fervently for this release for over a month, resisting the temptation to jump ship to Reeder many times over. Phantom Fish, the developer, promised its delayed release would be on the 10th and it has been delivered!
My biggest impatience with Byline was Instapaper integration which was not being considered as an upcoming feature until enough people asked the developer. After discovering the service and its iPhone application I am hooked on cleanly formatted web reading, devoid of annoying banner ads and fast caching on my phone. As well as the whole “I don’t have time to read this now but it looks interesting for later” idea that Instapaper facilitates.
Byline 3.0 delivers Send to Instapaper and more by actually using Instapaper’s webpage formatting engine to cache all webpages loaded by Byline! This is pure gold! And it is not just the pages it automatically caches when updating feeds but also pages loaded by clicking links in articles. In a way this is bad: once you get used to how fast things load mobile Safari surfing is agonising.
Other features include:
- post to Twitter (finally),
- new icons,
- intelligent caching of partial feeds,
- expandable folders to isolate individual feeds,
- in-app settings configuration,
Feature #3 is interesting but doesn’t work well with “the great aggregators” like Digg as their actual pages are concatenations. This is no fault of Byline but more an annoying fringe deficit from the mechanics of these websites. Thankfully, as mentioned above, on-clicking to that actual article gets formatted beautifully and loads crazy-fast.
A friend was quite sheepish about the announcement of #4, expandable folders. He feared that it would turn into an interface mess the likes of NetNewsWire on iPhone. This rubbed off on me so I am glad to report that Phantom Fish sat down and thought this through, successfully integrating the feature without negating the core functionality of Byline (reading assorted feeds in folders) and without having a huge, cumbersome list. I have noticed an odd thing which I am hoping is something that will sort itself out: my Apple folder, as an example, doesn’t contain all my feeds. Perhaps, since it is synchronising or the first time they will show up when they have new posts in them… fingers crossed.
Been conversing with PhFish on Twitter about the above issue and it seems I have found, in my opinion, a huge flaw with the new way Byline is handling feeds. Previously each feed folder was allocated a quota of feeds it would load. This was great as some folders have high traffic feeds while others have low traffic. This new universal “All Items” inbox now defines the quota globally. This sounds like a good idea, especially with the new caching mechanism, but for heavy users this fails to recognise that not all feeds are created equal. For instance my “news” folder contains sites like BBC, New York Times etc which post frequently. This folder alone is chewing up over 1/3 of my designated “quota”. Worse still is that if there isn’t enough quota the feeds themselves disappear (as shown above) so one’s list is always changing – not a stable experience. At the moment I have whole folders that aren’t loading any new content when I sync, like my “Apple” folder – one I read often…happy times.
I have proposed that the old per-folder cap be introduced in conjunction with the global limit. This way the feeds can be equalised and if set by the user (including being disabled completely) would cater for light feeders and heavy feeders. Hopefully a solution like this will happen as just increasing the global cap won’t solve the disparate feed loads.
#5, in-app settings, is fairly explanatory and very welcome for fast tinkering. The only thing missing I can think of is the white-on-black or “night mode” formatting for articles/webpages like the Instapaper app.
- Swipe to next article = nice!
- Edit > Mark all as read = no more scrolling down to get to this feature!
good to see the expandable folders weren’t #$%^ed up.
That had me worried. Looks like I should dload and install it! Am particularly intrigued with the instapaper caching engine for actual browsing. I can already see this will be addictive.
Do they argue that this is offset by the increased quota limit of 1000 rather than 100 now?
Well to my understanding, in Byline 2, this 100 upper limit was a per folder thing. There is no mechanism for limiting folders in Byline 3 so I am experiencing some of my folders loading 100s of items while other folders don’t get any allocation at all!
Phfish tip for folders limit: “Create a folder with the feeds you want when mobile and set that as the new “Main Folder” setting in Byline. A pain to set up maybe, but flexible.” – IMO it’s very good option! We can select which folders we want on mobile, ex. “Apple, (added) Mobile” and all folders we can now see on iPhone (We will see a folder Apple!)
Urg looks like this is probably the only solution for the foreseeable future. With so many feeds I don’t really want to have to think about what I want to read on the go. What a shame.
I think you are wrong in assuming that raising the global cap won’t solve the disparate rss feed problem. If the cap is large enough all feed problems disappear.
You can test this my putting part of your feeds into a folder and marking that folder as the “Main” folder in the setting. Instant full feed sync, assuming that the chosen folder has less than 1000 items.
This is how it would work globally if the cap was large enough (for example 10 000 items) to handle all feed items.
Oh of course. But that defeats the point of having the global cap in the first place: to limit the data that Byline chews up. I agree that a huge cap like that would make most problems disappear (unless one has an insane amount of feeds) but I don’t think it is an efficient way to do it on its own. Plus Phfish was only thinking of raising it to 2000, better than nothing I guess but the Byline 2 way just seems more sensible.
Unfortunately… either we have new, fast synchronization or old – slow. I guess: now Byline get all feeds in one pack and this is a problem.