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.

Version 1.2 is now available

The newest version of LuckNews is now available.

This version adds some awesome new features as well as generally improving all areas of the application.  The two biggest new features with this release are Article Search and the ability to view real web pages in the application.

The previous post discussed the ability to view real web pages - check it out.  I've been using this new feature of LuckNews for several weeks now and really like it.  To give it a try, simply open up the Subscription Information window for a subscription and turn on the option.  To open the Subscription Information window, select a single subscription and then in the File menu, select 'Subscription Information…'

Article Search is easy to use and works much as you would expect.  To start a search, select the 'Find Article' item in the Edit menu.  Then simply type words into the search window that has appeared.  Many applications always show the search window, even when you don't need it.  I chose to have the search window appear and disappear so that you can focus on the articles and their content.  I want LuckNews to have a clean, minimal interface.

There is a feature in Article Search which is not obvious - you are able to both search for articles which contain keywords as well as articles which do not contain keywords.  For example, you can find all articles which mention "hilo hawaii" in their content. Or if you wanted to find all articles which mention hilo but not hawaii, you would type: "hilo !hawaii".  The ! character at the start of a word means to only match articles which do not contain the word.

Also new is the ability to have the application cache images which enhances the ability to read articles when you do not have a network connection.  If you plan to read articles when you are not connected to the network, for example when you are on a sailboat in a tropical paradise, or on a plane or train, you can use this option to download all the images so they are available when you need them.


I hope you enjoy this release.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please forward them to:

lucknews.app@gmail.com

If you are enjoying the application, please add a comment in the App Store to help others with their choice to purchase LuckNews.

Version 1.2 is on the way...

I submitted version 1.2 of LuckNews to the AppStore today.  Here is a small preview:

LuckNews is now able to display the actual web page for a news article, rather than the RSS content.  Scrolling down a little in the page above, you see the following:

The page continues with many more images and more text.  The image below is what you would see in a RSS news reader which only shows the RSS content.  This is what you would see in version 1.1 of LuckNews, and most other RSS news readers.

Same article as above.  This is the RSS content.

Notice that apart from the RSS feed not containing any images, it also has much less content.  Many news feeds only send out a short summary of the article, leaving you to click through to the real web page to see the content.

LuckNews is now able to automatically fetch the real web content for an article and present it instead of the RSS news feed content.  In the 'Subscription Information' window, there is now an option you can select to show the web page content rather than the RSS.  There are some other new options as well, more on those later.

I come across many news feeds where the RSS content is much less rich than the real article on the web, this example is not contrived or artificial.  If you read a lot of web news, I'm sure you will have come across this as well.


The new version of LuckNews should be available in around a week or so, expect it to be available by sometime after February 21st.  Customers of version 1.1 or earlier will receive the update for free of course.

I hope you enjoy this new feature.  I do!

Version 1.1 is now available

The second release of LuckNews was made available at the Apple App store today.  There were many changes made to LuckNews for this release, and since submitting the app on the 21st, development has been continuing and I expect to have a third release out toward the end of February.


The user interface of LuckNews has been given a pretty large facelift for this release.  There are three main views in the application: the subscription list; the article list and the article view.  Each of these views has been improved in many ways.

In addition to the changes in appearance, there is a really nice change in how you can now navigate the articles you are reading.  The article view now supports the swipe gesture to allow you to navigate to the next and previous articles in the article list very easily.  This means you can use just your finger tips to scroll through an article to read it, and then swipe the article away to advance to the next one.

LuckNews now supports your being able to organize subscriptions into folders which allows you to group related subscriptions together.  More than one level of folders are possible - you can put a folder inside of another folder.  Moving subscriptions around is easily done in the standard Mac way, using drag and drop.  Folders also have two settings that give you control over how newly arrived articles for the subscriptions a folder contains interact with both the Notification Center and the number of unread articles count which appears on the application badge.  You can selectively disable both of these traits for a folder, although by default they work as normal.  Use the new 'Folder Information...' menu item in the File menu to control them.  In addition, the existing functionality that was in place for the OPML subscription interchange format has been improved to also support folders.

Also new is the ability to flag an article.  It is easy to view only the flagged articles for any subscription or set of subscriptions.  In this way, if you read an article you want to come back to later, you can simply flag it and when you want, have LuckNews show it to you again.

Normally, articles expire and are deleted when they are no longer present in a subscriptions feed.  This can be changed using the settings in both the Application preferences dialog as well as for individual subscriptions via the 'Subscription Information...' menu item.  The article expiry logic has changed slightly to never delete an article which you have flagged.  This means that you can let articles expire normally and flag the ones you like - all the flagged articles will remain forever and the others will go away when the expiry criteria are met.

There is now also some online help for LuckNews available on this web site.


I hope you enjoy this new release.  Feel free to forward comments and suggestions to:  lucknews.app@gmail.com

First release!

Welcome to LuckNews!


The little story behind LuckNews is that...  I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mountain Lion (10.8) a few months ago and found that the blogs that I had been reading through the Mail program were no longer working.  Apple had dropped support for RSS feeds from Mail and Safari in Mountain Lion.  I went to the App Store to look for an app to read the blogs and bought one and tried it out.  I didn't like it, so bought a second.  I didn't like that one, so I bought a third.  I didn't like that one either.  I didn't try them all and there may be an amazing RSS/Atom/News reader on the App Store that would have done exactly what I wanted...but hey, I'm a software developer with time on my hands so I decided to write my own.

I'm a retired software developer.  I worked professionally at Alias (which became Alias|Wavefront, then Alias Systems, then Autodesk) for 20 years.  Those were 20 good years but by the end I wanted a change and I had discovered sailing.  I had bought a sailboat a few years earlier and decided to go cruising - sailing around, here and there, exploring.  That story is described in my other blog.  As I'm currently back in Seattle after having been out cruising for a year, waiting for the summer to arrive so I can take off south again on my next journey I have some time to work on fun projects.

I hadn't programmed since I retired from Alias/Autodesk before leaving on my first cruise.  I had forgotten how much fun programming can be, and I've had a lot of fun creating LuckNews.

Version 1.0 is ready for consumption.  I have a list of things I plan to add over the next little while, but this version provides all the functionality needed in a simple RSS/Atom/News reader I think.  The things I hope to add will be bonus features, not strictly necessary.  I welcome suggestions and comments on the app of course.

The app only works on Mac's and only on those mac's running version 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or higher.  (There is nothing higher as I write this, but at some point there will be...)  Its cheap!  Its simple.

As an added bonus, if you recently upgraded to Mountain Lion and had been reading RSS news feeds in Mail and are annoyed that you can no longer do that, you may be wondering what happened to all those news subscriptions?  As long as you didn't do a clean install of the OS, they are still around and LuckNews can get them back for you.  Use the 'Import Subscriptions..." menu entry and follow what I hope is an easy set of steps to get them back.

If you haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion yet, and have been reading RSS news feeds in Mail, and plan to upgrade to Mountain Lion - then in order for LuckNews to retrieve your old RSS subscriptions you need to do an upgrade, not a clean install in order to easily get them back again.


I hope you enjoy!

Craig.

Recovering RSS Subscriptions from Apple Mail prior to Mountain Lion (10.8)

I'm posting this article hoping that Google may find it and show it to people who are searching for a way to solve this problem.

If you had been reading RSS subscriptions in the Apple Mail app prior to upgrading to 10.8, Mountain Lion, then you may have discovered that this is no longer supported.  If you knew about losing this capability and have been holding back on upgrading so as not to lose this capability, I believe this app may be for you.  If you have already upgraded to Mountain Lion and want to retrieve your old subscriptions, this app may be for you.  If you're already running Mountain Lion and read RSS and Atom news Subscriptions, this app is also for you - its a good little news reader.

If you have not yet upgraded to Mountain Lion and want to be able to retrieve your RSS Subscriptions, be sure that you perform an upgrade, not a fresh install.

If you fall into the group of people who want to retrieve your old Mail RSS News Subscriptions, the directions to retrieve them in LuckNews is this:

• launch LuckNews
• in the File menu, choose the 'Import Subscriptions..." menu entry
• you are presented with a dialog asking what you want to import.  Choose the second item, importing previously subscribed RSS subscriptions from Mail and press the 'Continue' button
• you are now presented with some directions.  Read them and continue.  Briefly, you will be presented with an Open dialog and you need to navigate to where the old Mail Subscriptions are located.  The location is given in the title bar of the Open Dialog, so just read the title bar and navigate to the folder it describes.  When the proper folder is selected, press the 'Open' button
• at this point LuckNews will search for your old Subscriptions and present you with the list it found.  Look through the list and accept them by pressing the 'Save' button

That's it!  The old RSS Subscriptions should be in the LuckNews Subscription list and the current articles retrieved.


* Note that LuckNews does not support retrieving RSS subscriptions from Safari prior to 10.8 - I never used that capability and so didn't build it into LuckNews - sorry if you fall into that camp.