Version 2.0.4 is out - how to restore your In-App purchases

Version 2.0.4 of LuckNews was released today.  This is a small update to LuckNews, containing:

• Changes to help improve the performance of large Subscription/Article databases 
• Fixes a bug with Notification Center integration related to the window being closed or minimized 
• Other minor changes 

If you had earlier purchased additional subscription capacity in LuckNews, you will need to restore your In-App purchase in order for LuckNews to recognize your purchase.  To do this:

1. Open the File menu and select the 'Open In-App Purchase Store...' menu item
2. In the dialog window which is presented, press the button labeled 'Restore In-App Purchase' in the lower left corner
3. Continue with the dialog's, verifying to the Apple App store that you are who you say you are
4. At the end of this (short) process, you will have your prior purchases restored

There is no charge for restore an earlier purchase - once you upgrade the capacity in LuckNews once, that purchase is good for all future updates.

Enjoy!

Version 2.0.3 is now out!

Version 2.0.3 was released on July 3rd.  This is now the 11th version of LuckNews.

Google Reader has now been turned off.  This is a little unfortunate for those people who have been using it.  If you've been using Google Reader and are looking for an alternative - try LuckNews!  Its a free download.  Try LuckNews with up to 8 subscriptions for free.  Beyond 8 subscriptions there are in-app purchases available to expand the capacity.  In the US you can purchase an unlimited download capacity for only $1.99 - its inexpensive.  Give it a try.

Version 2.0.3 is a bug fix release not a feature release.  The changes in this version is fairly minor.  Anybody who has been using an earlier version without any issues won't find anything new in this version.

All of the changes in this version are there as a result of feedback I have received from customers.  I had a customer in Australia report a number of problems when he imported his Google Reader data.  He was kind enough to provide me with his data and it is all importing very well now.  I also had a customer who ran into problems with articles he had read which were re-appearing as unread articles.  I have modified the rules for how and when articles are deleted from the database to avoid this problem in the future.

The fixes are:

• Fixes a bug where a subscription containing articles which had absolutely no content would cause a problem when updating the database
• Improvements to OPML import. Google Reader is providing some interesting data, which is now handled
• Subscriptions imported from OPML which refer to invalid feeds are now imported rather than being ignored. I decided it was better to let the user deal with this error rather than ignoring the errors
• Improved the article deletion rules


As a reminder - if you are a user of LuckNews, and like it, please add a comment to the Apple App store.  If you like the app and have other friends who use Mac's - help spread the word :-)


Thank you for your support!


Cheers,
  Craig.

Version 2.0.2 is now available

Apple just approved version 2.0.2 of LuckNews, and it will be available on all of the various app stores  within 24 hours (of early June 24th.)

I'm pretty happy with this release.  The changes in the release are:

• Improvements to swiping and the page transitions
• Improvements to the new 'show newest article' mode when selecting a new subsription (or set of subscriptions)
• Improvements to article refresh to avoid duplicated articles
• Improvements to the context menu displayed in the Article view
• Found another subscription which provided malformed dates. They are now handled
• Other minor changes 

I found a problem in 2.0.1 where, if you were viewing unread articles and you swiped to the next article just as the previous one was disappearing from the list, you might view the same article again.  I'm surprised that nobody else reported this to me.  Just as a reminder - if you find a problem with LuckNews, please report it, I'm always happy to hear of problems encountered so that I can fix them.

In 2.0.1 I introduced a new mode which gave you the option of which article to view when you switched to viewing a new subscription.  By default, you always view the most recent article you viewed in that list.  The new option let you view the newest article in the list.  I've modified how the initial article is marked as 'having been read' slightly to allow you to click on many subscriptions in a row and to not mark the article 'been read' until you pause slightly.  I hope this addresses a workflow issue of clicking on the wrong subscription by accident.  Nobody wrote to me complaining about anything, but regardless, I prefer this new workflow.  Its a little subtle, try it out.  Let me know if you like it.

I was also noticing, and had reported, that some subscriptions would sometimes show an old article again.  This was related to the 'keep articles in LuckNews until they expire from the subscription' option.  I believe this is fixed now.

The context menu in the article view pane is now much more complete - it has the types of items that are normally present in applications such as Safari.  So you can now copy a link, copy an image, open an image and other options.  The menu is context sensitive and generally contains more options.

There are also a few other minor things that were fixed.

A short note on the app price.  LuckNews has been out for two releases now in its new format, which is as a free download with an available in-app purchase.  LuckNews comes with the capacity to hold 8 subscriptions, if you need more than that you can purchase additional capacity for a small charge.  Its interesting to me that the vast majority of the downloads of LuckNews have not upgraded to additional capacity.  I have over 50 subscriptions I monitor in LuckNews.  Come on people - there are all sorts of interesting things to read out there  :-)

One last short note.  If you haven't added a comment to the Apple App store, and you like the app, please add a comment.  Developers such as myself depend on favorable comments in order to have the application be more widely accepted and downloaded.  If you add a comment, or already have added a comment, you have my sincere thanks!

Please let me know if you find any problems.  

All in all, its a pretty good deal for free, or almost free for those of you who have upgraded, right?

Enjoy!

Craig.

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!

Version 2.0 is available!

LuckNews version 2.0 was released today, April 25th.  There is one large change in this release, along with several bug fixes and a few other improvements.

The largest change to LuckNews is that it is now free!  If you use 8 or fewer subscriptions in LuckNews, then you will have access to all of its features and power and yet pay absolutely nothing.

LuckNews has moved to a new sales model.  You are able to purchase subscription capacity through an in-app purchase.  If you use more than 8 subscriptions, then you will be able to purchase additional subscription capacity through two in-app purchases.  You can purchase the capacity to hold up to 20 subscriptions, or you can purchase an unlimited number of subscriptions.  Its hard to talk about prices, as LuckNews is available for sale world wide and the price point is different in all of those countries.  In the USA, the first level of capacity is available for $0.99 and the unlimited capacity product is available for $1.99 - the App Stores in other countries should offer similar affordable prices.

I expect that many customers will not need to purchase any additional capacity at all.  For all of you that fall into this category, enjoy!

If you need to purchase additional subscription capacity I think you will find the process fast and easy.  In the File menu, there is a new item at the bottom called 'Open In-App Purchase Store...'  If you invoke this menu item you will see the in-app purchase store.  Once you have selected a product from that window and pressed the 'Continue' button, you will proceed to the Apple store dialog's.  Apple controls the actual in-app purchase, the process is secure and reliable.


If you are a customer who has purchased LuckNews prior to version 2.0, and you have more than 8 subscriptions, this change is a little unfortunate.  In earlier versions of LuckNews, you always had an unlimited number of subscriptions available.  When you upgrade, you will find that your current set of subscriptions is completely functional, however you will not be able to create any additional subscriptions.  I apologize for this.  Unfortunately, Apple runs the App Store and I do not have access to a customer list or the ability to provide existing customers with free upgrades to the new unlimited subscription product.  This means that if existing customers want to continue to create new subscriptions that you will need to purchase the additional capacity.  I'm sorry about that.


I hope that everybody enjoys the new version of LuckNews.  I look forward to continuing development on this product in the future.


Feedback on this change is welcome.

If you have suggestions for improvements, please forward them.

LuckNews up to version 1.2.3 now

Since version 1.2 was released around February 19th, there have been three new versions released.

Version 1.2.1 addressed an defect which could cause the application to crash.  I found the problem within a few hours of the 1.2 release being available for sale and submitted a fix immediately.

Version 1.2.2 addressed two issues reported by users.  The first issue was with a URL which could not be added to the app successfully, an ebay link.  The problem was found and fixed.  This release also changed the way the application handled the refresh time interval to allow users to set the refresh time interval to an interval less than 5 minutes.  5 minutes remains the minimum interval you can set using the applications interface.  A back-door method is available if you want a shorter refresh interval, the method for doing this is described in the help section of this blog.

Version 1.2.3 addresses a few more issues reported by users.  When viewing articles displayed as HTML, if the web page contained links which invoked javascript code to open a new window, nothing would happen when you clicked on the link.  After the fix, when you click on these links they open in the default browser the same as non-javascript links.  Additionally, the subscription list widget has been improved somewhat to maintain each folders open/closed state as you reorganize subscriptions using drag and drop.  The widget behavior is improved, not yet perfected.  I also received a suggestion to add an option to allow LuckNews to open links in the default browser 'in the background' rather than bringing the browser forward and making it the new active application.  I added a new preference to control the default behavior when clicking on a link and allow the command key when clicking to alter this behavior.  This now works in a similar manner to how the Mail app works when opening links in mail messages - although LuckNews provides some visual feedback when opening a link in the browser with it remaining the background application, which is an improvement over the Mail app.

Version 1.2.3 also fixes a crash reported related to turning on the cacheing of images for a subscription in certain circumstances.  Lastly, I also came across an RDF style subscription (an older format, RSS or Atom are the newer preferred formats) which was not parsing properly.  This parsing problem is now fixed.


So, there have been three new versions of LuckNews in a little over 2 months, containing a mixture of new features and fixes for problems found.  Please continue to send me reports of issues that you find, or suggestions for improvements.  I'll continue to do what I can to address them.