I was wondering if there was a open source base app that I could use to make my own app?
What I want out of an app is just for it to pull in the feeds from my blog and alow me to read them from there.
If not, how hard is this to make?
I am going to be starting a new site soon and I just think it would be really cool to have an Android app to go with it.
chaos67731 said:
I was wondering if there was a open source base app that I could use to make my own app?
What I want out of an app is just for it to pull in the feeds from my blog and alow me to read them from there.
If not, how hard is this to make?
I am going to be starting a new site soon and I just think it would be really cool to have an Android app to go with it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try this... I'd give this a low-moderate level of difficulty.
Android simple RSS reader tutorial
And Google themselves just released their own Google Reader app so just add your feeds to Google Reader and use their app. Google Reader has a nice feature to scroll up/down through the feed articles using the volume rocker. It just doesn't have a widget yet. I'd like to see a Google Reader widget/shortcut for this app that would update every so often showing at least the number of unread articles. Anyway, it's Google and it's FREE!
I will look at the google reader but I was thinking more along the lines of Engadget so it is only my feeds being pulled in.
But I would be more than happy with a phandroid new style.
Related
Hi,
Am pretty new to Android and came across this really nice App/Widget called ColorNote. An all in one package that has a lot of features and comes in a reasonably sized package.
I'm sure many of you are already using this. The reason for the post however is not to promote this, but to ask if anyone either knows of a way to contact the author or know of an alternative to this.
What I need is an app with all the features of the above, but with a widget that is NOT a sticky post, but with something like a flip pad. That is the widget shows page 1 of the notes and then I either click an up/ down arrow to move between pages or click on the tip of a page to move between them as in the app here -> http://www.appbrain.com/app/simple-notes/hu.monsta.simplenotes
Can someone help me?
Thanks
Evernote is one of the best note taking apps. You can do voice notes, text notes and pictures. Web, desktop and phone apps. My only real complaint is that you can't write checkable lists on the phone app, but they are adding new stuff all the time. Oh and it doesn't have a widget, but you should still check it out.
springpad is also pretty good.. has awidget where you can scrol through different notes...
I use colornote for checklists. I like it. Its very clean and easy to use.
I have been trying to embrace the cloud using Springpad on my phone, CR-48 (meetings/note taking computer at work), my W7 work desktop and my Macbook Pro personal laptop. It's been working out well so far.
Colornote is nice for taking quick notes, like during a meeting or something.
For everything else, I also use Springpad. In the past I've gone through Catch (formerly 3banana) and Evernote both but I feel that Springpad is superior to all of them.
Just to add an extra choice, I've been liking Simplenote
Andronoter is a free Android client of it, www.simplenoteapp.com is the web interface.
I am looking for an rss reader that would allow me to share the article I am currently reading in email but not just the link to the article. I have tried newsrob, google reader, and pulse. None of them seem to be able to do it except to share the link. Pulse sort of shares the article but only a small snip of the article. I am coming from an ipod touch where I used to use byline and I love that feature because then when I email an article, the person does not have to load a website to read the article because it is already contained in the email.
Is there any application like that for android, and one that supports honeycomb? It can be paid or free.
It also needs to have offline syncing and able to sync with google reader. If the ipod can have it I dont see why there couldn't be an app similar to byline on android.
I just downloaded a couple more reader and I found JustReader. This app lets me share the text of an article but if any images appear then on the email, and "obj" square appears.
Did you ever find one that lets you share the actual article instead of just a link? this is driving me and the people I share with crazy, so I'm going through Android RSS apps trying to find one that will let me share the way I want to.
i havent found one. i just keep the article unread and then share it from google reader on my pc
How can I 'star' articles? Also, any way to turn off the swiping between articles?
Sent from my NookColor using Tapatalk
I looked at a lot of RSS readers before settling on NewsRob. It has a star in the top right to star an item. It has thumb buttons on both sides for next/previous articles (like Kindle hard buttons).
Very nice app and completely free. Give it a try.
in landscape mode with simple article view, its in the upper right hand corner.
in other other modes / view modes, not 100% sure
i have tried newsrob, greader, googles own app, and finally gave up on all of them being too slow and am currently using google reader mobile webpage in dolphinHD, its sad that google cant make their own app to be as functional as the website.
my only complaints about using google reader mobile website, is 1. the share button is small, so its hard to quickly hit; 2. i have to click-though the page of rss feeds when clicking on a tag, to get through to the articles, i wish i could just skip that, since thats the reason i tagged certain rss feeds together in the first place.
maybe some screenshots i have seen from some honeycomb reader that are faster switching back and forth between the list and individual article than the current 2.x apps. i guess thats where i am picking up speed using the google reader mobile website, since it allows you to open an article and read it while maintaining the unread article list.
Hi,
I published a BETA of my new ebook reader, Bookviser. If you want to test it, please email me your Live ID associated with your Windows Phone 7 device, I will add you to the beta testers list and send you the Marketplace download link. My email is [email protected]
Bookviser can read EPUB, FB2 and TXT files. You can download books using incorporated Feedbook search or upload books from your computer.
Thank you.
Alex
Ebook readers without OPDS support are nonsense today. Also, you don't support hyphenation (especially for Russian), don't you?
New ebook reader app may have some sense, if you (at least!) implement all functionality of Jim Chapman's "Freda" ebook reader...
sensboston said:
Ebook readers without OPDS support are nonsense today. Also, you don't support hyphenation (especially for Russian), don't you?
New ebook reader app may have some sense, if you (at least!) implement all functionality of Jim Chapman's "Freda" ebook reader...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your comment . Honestly I did not think about OPDS support, but will add it for sure.
As to hyphenation, it was planned and will be added in new versions as well. This is only the beginning. I just decided to publish a version with basic features first and then add new one by one.
If there is dropbox support, that's enough for me.
UI looks way better than freda.
Also, single book pinning to start screen is a must.
Just used the app for some time. UI is smooth and beautiful. Page transition is smooth too.
Sent from my SGH-i917 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
What about navigation and font sizes ?
help
I am trying to use bookviser and even downloaded the sync tool, there is no confirmation it is uploaded, can't view online library. And it appears to be available to download on my device but then it errors out am I doing something wrong, epub is about 170mb
sp_sheffield said:
What about navigation and font sizes ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The font sizes are going from 25 to 40, but I will add smaller sizes by the time of release.
What do you mean by navigation?
Loving this app, just what I needed.
The "goto page" is great, nice interface, smooth page flip. Once you get the skydrive support working (or do folders/management of Bookviser account storage) this thing will be top shelf!
Looking good! Serious alternative to Freda and Raccoon. But please add DropBox support! All my books are there.
I think there's a bug somewhere. When I try to open a book in epub, downloaded from net, 1.74 mb of space, the app crashes. And also, a dropbox support would be great. In rest, if dropbox will be added, I will uninstall FREDA and never even try other ebook reader. Cross my heart. Cheers and great work
shtresatu said:
... I will uninstall FREDA and never even try other ebook reader. Cross my heart. ...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I hope you'd at least take a look at the new Freda update (2.5) and send me feedback about how you'd like it to be improved
still needs settings for line spacing to be usable
5-31-21 I've ceased development on this app because I think there is a better alternative. See post #7.
*updated to version 1.3, adding error trap for discontinued or blank feeds*
It's been awhile since the demise of the last working version of Genie Widget (aka Google News and Weather) but not so long since the big G retooled news.google.com so that our browsers can no longer deal with it and also put the kibosh on the Google News RSS feeds. Sigh.
I have a work-around
Google News 1.3 for the NST/G exploits the "alerts" that Google offers on news topics. These alerts can be optioned in the form of RSS feeds. My app downloads the HTML source for the feed, picks out all the good stuff and trashes all the rest, then builds up a local HTML document which is easily displayed by our browsers (I highly recommend Opera Mobile for ease of scrolling and general all-around function). You can build up your own topics, change your mind, mix them about, read that one more story you didn't get to the first time around, etc. I'm not saying that your browser will negotiate every target link. Some newspaper sites have just become too much. That was true even when Genie Widget was still working. But updating Opera Mobile for TLS 1.2 solves much of that. See this post for details.. The beauty of this app is in the simplicity. It's entirely browser-based once the feeds are downloaded, so you're not going back and forth between the app and your browser (like the current Google News app.......). Designed for both portrait and landscape.
Requirements
1. Android 2.1 has a security issue with opening local HTML files. In order for Google News to work properly you need to address that. Included in the zip below is a tiny app, android-open-in-browser-0.0.4-4-debug. Install that. It's not my app but I have used it for years and wish I could credit the originator.
2. This is a Tasker-generated app. If you already have one of my other Tasker-generated apps or have previously installed GApps, you don't need the two Google maps library files included in the zip and can delete them. If you do need them, copy the two files into the locations shown below:
/system/etc/permissions/com.google.android.maps.xml
/system/framework/com.google.android.maps.jar
Set permissions for both files to rw-r--r-- and reboot. Without these files resident, the app will not install.
3. Create a folder in the root directory of your sdcard: Google News (exactly as shown)
4. Install the app itself, Google News.1.apk
How to use
Before you run the app you need to select some news categories, set up the feeds, get the URLs, blah-blah-blah. All of this is covered in the PDF included with the zip. It may seem a little annoying at the start, but it goes quickly once you get started and it's not like you have to do it every time you use the app. You're just setting up your news topics, just as if you were using the current Google News (either the app or the web version). Once you have your topics and URLs and have edited the included text file google_rss_feeds.txt, copy that into the Google News folder of your sdcard.
Note: recently (June 2019) the big G has not been very consistent with the RSS feeds. Some days they are "empty" but come back the next day with lots of stories. Some feed topics simply "die" and a minor change in the topic will resurrect them (change "World" to "World news", as an example). Version 1.3 includes a trap for these eventualities so that the app should not crash, even if your first feed comes up empty. To inspect/edit your feeds, point your browser (on your PC) to your Google Alerts page. If you are signed in this will be found among the options on the Google home page, in the upper right corner where the "apps" grid is shown.
Now you're good to go. Start the app, make sure you're connected to WiFi. There are only three buttons on the app screen. The first one, "Fetch the news" does just that. You will see a little toast that the first news category is being prepared. Once that is done, you will be taken to the browser and that page will open. Meanwhile the remaining pages are being downloaded and reconstructed in the background.
The news page is very simple. I tried to aim for readability over all other considerations (this is the reason the news items are in bold black, even though they are the external links). I have my Opera Mobile set to 100% page zoom. It looks good to me, but you could probably get away with 75%. External websites are another matter. At the title bar left is a drop-down menu button that gives you access to your other news topics. Since no fixed navbar schemes work under Android 2.1, there is a duplicate drop-up menu bar at the end of the page. The use of NoRefresh, or to a lesser extent FastMode, is a plus.
Edit: you cannot use this app with Opera Mini. It lacks the ability to open local HTML files.
The second option on the opening screen, "Read old news" sounds a bit daft, but I just thought maybe someone might have been looking at the topic pages, saw something that interested them and then got interrupted. So this option opens the first local file in the browser again and you can navigate from there. Strictly speaking, WiFi is not needed to browse the local files once they have been created, but it is needed to pursue any stories.
The third option simply dismisses the app screen.
Whew! So this is new...and I think I exterminated all the bugs, but I did not try other browsers. I'm open to suggestions and would appreciate feedback.
Google alert change? No option for RSS alerts anymore...
First off, thanks so much for putting the time and effort into this app. I would love to have a more "future-proof" news reader solution for my NST. Sadly however, in typical Google fashion of constantly dropping/messing with feature support, it seems that there is no longer an option to deliver Google alerts to RSS feeds (only email addresses). If I'm reading this thread and your PDF correctly, I'm worried that this may break the app. In any case I'm stuck on page 3 of your setup PDF since I can't figure out how to get the RSS alert string from Google anymore. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
v619284 said:
First off, thanks so much for putting the time and effort into this app. I would love to have a more "future-proof" news reader solution for my NST. Sadly however, in typical Google fashion of constantly dropping/messing with feature support, it seems that there is no longer an option to deliver Google alerts to RSS feeds (only email addresses). If I'm reading this thread and your PDF correctly, I'm worried that this may break the app. In any case I'm stuck on page 3 of your setup PDF since I can't figure out how to get the RSS alert string from Google anymore. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm away from home right now but my copy of the app is working so the RSS feeds must still exist. I'll have to sit down with my instructions in front of the computer and see what mischief they've done. Thanks for letting me know.
v619284 said:
If I'm reading this thread and your PDF correctly, I'm worried that this may break the app. In any case I'm stuck on page 3 of your setup PDF since I can't figure out how to get the RSS alert string from Google anymore. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OK, so I've run through the instructions sitting at my PC. Everything is correct although Firefox no longer wants to open the RSS feed page as anything other than an xml "text" file. That just means the image on page 4 needs updating.
As far as page 3, everything is currently exactly as shown. Just to be sure, you have to be signed in to Google on your browser before you do any of this. Then when you get to the screen depicted on page 3 you need to change the "Deliver to" option to RSS feed. But even before that, it's important not to get sucked into the email alert business back on page 2. Do NOT click on "Create Alert" there, only on "Show options". That's how you get to the screen I show on page 3.
When you finally get to click on the little RSS symbol shown on the lower half of page 3, you (at least on Firefox) may end up at a page of xml code, or perhaps your browser may show a news feed page. Regardless, the URL shown for the page is the same and it's what you need to copy, just as described on page 4.
Let me know if you are still having issues with this.
v619284 said:
First off, thanks so much for putting the time and effort into this app. I would love to have a more "future-proof" news reader solution for my NST. Sadly however, in typical Google fashion of constantly dropping/messing with feature support, it seems that there is no longer an option to deliver Google alerts to RSS feeds (only email addresses). If I'm reading this thread and your PDF correctly, I'm worried that this may break the app. In any case I'm stuck on page 3 of your setup PDF since I can't figure out how to get the RSS alert string from Google anymore. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So a few days after I wrote my last post, the app stopped working for me. It just hangs on "Preparing......News"
Google has apparently changed the format of their RSS xml file. Right in the middle of something else at the moment, but I will get it fixed.
Nope, nix that. After fooling around with the app and an xml file from the Big G, I find nothing out of place and it seems the app is now working again
They're just messing with us.
Edit: Indeed they are. Today I caught another malfunction but this time looked at the Tasker routines for an error. Google is sending out (at least today) RSS feeds with empty content fields. That messes up my app. So I wrote an error trap for that. Updated in first post. Have to watch the big G like a hawk....
v619284 said:
If I'm reading this thread and your PDF correctly, I'm worried that this may break the app. In any case I'm stuck on page 3 of your setup PDF since I can't figure out how to get the RSS alert string from Google anymore. Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Whilst looking around for a solution to a different issue, I came across this: https://medium.com/@cassandragraft/...tion-not-appearing-heres-the-fix-bf842ca32b88
It appears to address the issue you describe. I never encountered the issue, but obviously some people have.
The Big G is making me very angry lately. Even version 1.2 with a new error trap is crashing. I'm finding that some of my feeds are "empty". The skeleton of the RSS file is there but there is no content populating the file. A category as ordinary as "world" is simply blank. This is new and very annoying. Just a change of topic to "world news" brings up a list of stories longer than your arm. I encountered this before with "science" and fixed it with a slight change in name, so I should have seen this coming. It's a nasty game Google seems to be playing....
Anyway, if the app crashes on the first topic it leaves an overlay artifact behind when you exit. To remove this, go to the App Manager and force stop the app. I will work on a fix which will alert you to the effect that the feed appears dead but allow the app to complete the download of whatever is still working and exit properly.
Grr....
Edit: App updated to v1.3 in first post. I hope that solves the problems. For now.
As I mentioned in my edit of the first post, I think my app is exhibiting creakiness already owing to Opera Mobile's increasing difficulty negotiating many websites.
I have an alternative to suggest, however, that is totally browser based. It seems to work "OK" with Opera Mobile although text display is a bit small with a default zoom of 100%. In Opera Mini, however, it shines, especially with NoRefresh.
Thanks to XDA member @SJT75 , I found out about a list of text-only news sites. One of them is a text version of Google News! The list is at: https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/
While the Google News option does not allow for custom categories (hey, there's an app for that!), it does cover all the usual suspects. Even better, all of the links lead to text-only versions of the sources. Occasionally you go to a page and find it could not be fetched by whatever mechanism the author is using, but pages (even those error ones) include a link to the original source
Also notable on the list are the NPR and CNN sites. Both work well.