Feed Farmer Update

We want to go over upcoming enhancements to Feed Farmer, our feed-reader/podcast-downloader for Android.

User Interface

Time for another re-vamp of the user interface!

The tabs are gone!  You get that vertical space back.  Now there is a Sliding Drawer navigation pane.  Swipe in from the left-hand side, right-hand if you are in RTL land.

The new navigation pattern starts with the “root” level of items you can access.  Selecting an item shows its “contained” items in the main screen.  From there, it works the same as previous: select an item, and it comes up in the appropriate fragment.

The exciting part is Feed Farmer will provide new things as “items”

• latest items from all feeds
• podcasts ready-to-play (added to media player)
• podcasts not downloaded yet
• bookmark list
• error reports (feeds don’t all last forever)
• discovery links

The discovery in particular hopefully moves to a more-accessible location in the UI.

Error Reports

There was some deficiency in the error reporting.  The system notifications did not include any error information.  We also added more information to the item text in the Activity Log and the feed’s Error Report item.