Version 2.0.1 is now available

I have been working on a small update to LuckNews.  It was submitted to the AppStore last week and has just been approved by Apple.  Version 2.0.1 should be available to everyone as soon as their respective AppStores receive the update.

For those of you who had purchased an upgrade using the In-App purchase option, you may need to restore the products you have purchased by using the 'Restore In-App Purchase' button in the LuckNews In-App store, which is available in the File menu.  For those of you who haven't yet purchased an upgrade - please consider doing so - rest assured that I'll spend any revenue the app generates wisely (mainly on morning coffee.)


The new version fixes a crash that could have been encountered in rare circumstances, if you had turned off the 'keep unread articles' option for a subscription.  With the update it is no longer an issue.

There is also a fix that when swiping through articles, if you changed you mind about which article you wanted to see just after the swipe was finished and started a new one quickly, you could have been left in a state where you didn't see anything.

Along with these fixes there are a number of small improvements.

I had a number of requests to change the initial article which you view when switching to a new subscription (or set of subscriptions.)  The old behavior was to show you the most recently read article, the request was to show the newest article.  I have added a preference that gives you the choice.

With the old behavior, when switching to a new subscription that had new articles to read, you would read them in the order oldest to newest - you start from where you left off last time and page forward through time to the newest article.  If you select the new preference, then you end up reading new articles in the order newest to oldest.  Its your choice.

A second change is to slightly alter what the article list view shows as you page between the articles.  It continues to show the selected article - the one you are viewing.  The change is that if you have elected to only view the unread articles in that list, the previous article (the one you have just finished reading) is also retained momentarily in the list.  This allows you to swipe back to the previous article if you choose to do so.  If you don't swipe back to the previous article within a few seconds, then it is removed from the list.  This fixes something that I found annoying - when I was quickly swiping through articles I would occasionally see something on an article just as it started to go away - but getting back to it was tedious as it would be removed from the unread list.  Now if you quickly change your mind you can swipe back to it and continue reading.  Give it a try - it will be easier to understand as you use it than it is to describe.  It may look a little odd at first seeing two unread articles in the list momentarily, but I hope its a good change.  Let me know what you think.

A third change is that there is now a context menu on the article view.  This is the 'right click' menu, which you get to with either a two finger click on the article, or an option click.  There are no items in the menu which aren't available via different means in the application, but the items are easier to access with this method.


There are a few other small changes, but nothing dramatic.


If you have any suggestions for future improvements, please let me know.

Importing data from Google Reader

As many people are now aware, Google Reader is going to be going away on July 1st.  If you have a Google Reader account and want to get your subscriptions into LuckNews, its relatively painless.


1) Go to Google Takeout and either select the 'Choose Services' link at the top of the page, or simply follow this link

2) Press the 'Create Archive' button

3) Google now prepares your download.  When it is finished, press the 'Download' button.  You may need to sign in to Google Reader at this point, and you may need to press the 'Download' button again

4) Now that the file is downloaded to your Mac, go back to LuckNews

5) In the File menu, select the 'Import Subscriptions...' menu item

6) Navigate to the file Google downloaded for you.  It may be in your Downloads folder off of your home directory.  In the Downloads folder, look for an item with your email address followed by '-takeout'.  Open that directory which should contain a Reader directory.  Open the Reader directory and select the file named 'subscriptions.xml'

7) You are then presented with a dialog in LuckNews, simply select the subscriptions you wish to keep, and then accept them

You now have all of your Google Reader subscriptions in LuckNews, ready to read.

Enjoy!