Feed Farmer Update

We have almost completed a significant revamp, see below!

Layered Browsing

Making use of the Back Stack and Up Navigation provides a very “layered” browsing experience.

What this means is instead of using a single Browser view for everything, Feed Farmer uses multiple levels of Browser view, each with its own Back Stack.  A good example of this transition is when you are viewing a Feed Item, and select a link to an “external” URL.

Instead of using that same Browser to display the link, a new Browser is started, and put onto the (Android) Back Stack.  This sets a “checkpoint” you can pop off by using Up Navigation (click the app icon in Action Bar).  In the new Browser, you can continue to navigate to additional links, and use the Back key for the expected Go Back function.  Once that Browser runs out of Go Back, it pops itself from the Back Stack, and you return to the Feed Item Browser.

The Up Navigation comes in handy when you are many links deep browsing, and you want to abandon that entire “session” which would otherwise require many taps on the Back key.

New Formats

Thanks to improvements in Synder, Feed Farmer is now able to process additional formats:  Open Search Suggestions and OPML.

Backup

We are now taking advantage of Google Backup for application backup and restore functionality.  Currently saves Feed List.

Search

The Search List is now part of the provider database, so you can add more search sources directly or via Discovery (see below).  We also removed “dead” sources.

The Search List will become part of the backup data set.

Discovery

One of the great unknown features of Feed Farmer is its ability to surface additional URLs for you to explore or augment your Feed List, based on web pages you visit while using Feed Farmer.  This update tries to make Discovery more accessible.

The new Browser fragment scans every URL visited for “discovery” links in the HTML, and briefly presents these in a popup panel if any are found.  It also scans every “anchor” element for URLs that “look like” an RSS or Atom file.

All discovery URLs are collected and displayed in a separate pane, accessible from the Options Menu.  This displays a 2-level list by URL, and from there you can preview and add URLs (to Bookmarks), Feeds, Open Search and OPML sources.

Tabs

The original Browser tab is gone, and is replaced by the Bookmarks tab, which presents a grid of your bookmarks for easy access.  The tab order is now Feeds, Search, Bookmarks.

Generated Content

Feed Farmer generates its own HTML content for Feed Items, Search Results, etc.  It is a minimal re-packaging of a Feed Item’s content; some Feeds provide HTML-formatted content, others only text.

We will add links in the content to get at application features, e.g. Add Attachment if a feed item contains attachment(s), or Preview Feed if an item represents a feed URL (e.g. OPML).

Sign Up!

We are pushing this update to beta pretty soon, so you can get easy access by joining our Google Group and then accessing the download link.