Resco Neeews! for Palm OS (v2.41.1)

Product history

Version 2.41 | Apr 23, 2009

Version 2.41.1

• Another skweezer fix. (skweezer.com stopped working and had to be replaced by www.skweezer.com)

News

• Podcasts: Long names containing spaces are processed correctly.
• Improved processing of the http redirections.
• 'Download Full Article' command uses web compression defined in the General Options dialog. (Previous releases always used skweezer.)

Version 2.40 | Sep 03, 2008

Offline article download

Articles have new download icon - an arrow oriented downwards. (Shortcut 'd' works as well.)
• By pressing this icon the full article is downloaded into the cache and the icon color changes.
• Next press of the download icon opens the local copy of the article.
• To download multiple articles press their download icons. (Even if the download is in progress.)
• Offline articles are downloaded into the image cache. (Note that once the cache gets filled, the oldest items - images or full articles - will be discarded.)
• Use Cache Options to suppress or allow the download of images belonging to the article.
• If you want to open original web article, use the classic way - the application menu.

The download always uses the skweezer compression:
• This compression is efficient - substantially reduces the download size.
• The results are mostly satisfactory - usually better than the display of the original article.
• Google compression could not be used as it subdivides the page download into multiple sub-pages.

Other news

• Centro compatibility
• Possibility to schedule with 1 minute resolution.
• Web compression: Skweezer stopped working because of the URL change. v2.40 uses the new URL.

Version 2.31 | Oct 16, 2007

Version 2.31.1

• Change in the registration for the compatibility reasons with Resco Suite
• Timeout error is not considered fatal for multi-feed update

News

• Opened newspaper: All article menu shortcuts can be typed without using menu, e.g. 'x' stands for expand/collapse
• Treo 755 / Centro support (return from browser via Home button)
• About dialog > Check Updates - Fix for Resco Backup Pro.
• Image context menu (tap the image placeholder icon) offers the option to download an image.

Version 2.30 | Oct 10, 2007

Group operations

These actions work optionally for all newspapers:

• Menu option 'Mark All as Read'
• Menu option 'Update Log'
• Editing of the newspaper scheduler

Other news

• Main menu is case sensitive and greatly simplified.
• Possibility do download Resco products via OTA (About dialog)
• Improved log
• Scheduler shows live clock
• Several fixes/improvements related to the treatment of non-standard conditions such as missing files, inactive feeds, automatic updates etc.

Version 2.20 | Apr 29, 2007

Images

• Save As Dialog (from image context menu)
• Improved loader (e.g. recognizes gif images with .jpg suffix - happens with Flickr)
• Cache compacting works reliably

Dynamic feeds:

• Added BlogDigger (With image and podcast search)
• Localized Google News (US, EN, DE, ES... over 30 countries/languages)
• Html stripped off from the feed preview

Opened newspaper:

• Cursor control: Right key wraps around the newspaper
• Menu option 'Mark As Read' works as a toggle

Improvements:

• Fix: Generation of the filename for a podcast; used to fail if the podcast string contained invalid characters
• Html: Better rendering of the tables

Other news:

• Newspaper history: Instead of fixed 10 issues the user can set number of stored issues.
• Feed Search: Added preview
• Article Search (Warning: Searches only the article cache; generated newspapers are ignored.)
• Menu > Disconnect: If Neeews! finds out that some other app(s) keep open connection, the user is given the possibility to close all connections by force.

Version 2.10 | Mar 09, 2007

v 2.10.2

• Support for Xino, Eudora web browsers
• Possibility to select web browser (General Options)

v 2.10.1

• Improved feed detection for given web address
• Web compression via Google
• New PDF manual

Warning:

The old article DB gets deleted.
(Newspapers survive; just you shall not be able to add old articles to Favorites.)

Podcasts:

• Neeews! includes basic internal podcast player with streaming ability. (Available on all newer Palm models since T5/T650.) Hence you don't necessarily need Pocket Tunes Deluxe to use the streaming.
• Resuming interrupted podcast download - provided the web server supports this action.
  Procedure:
  Select 'Download' in the podcast context menu. If the podcast file already exists, Neeews! will ask you whether to resume download.
  If you want a new download from scratch, then delete the old podcast file first. (The delete option is part of the context menu.)
• Simple podcast manager: Provides info about the files in the /Audio card folder as well as basic file management.

Dynamic feeds:

• New services: Digg, TailRank
• Possibility to test the dynamic feed content during the feed definition

Other news:

• Incoming news notification includes a beep sound (system volume preference is used)
• Support for huge image feeds (image loading on demand is used in such case)
• Change in the focus control when reading a newspaper issue: Article selection moves automatically with the scrolling
• Partial support for proxy connections: Provided you use Blazer through a proxy, Neeews! will take over Blazer settings.
• Article export (eMail, memo) strips off html formatting
• Optional use of web compression when opening web browser (skweezer, mlvb) Dramatically reduces network traffic.
• Possibility to use the card as the article storage (Article Cache dialog)
• Options reorganized and extended

Version 2.01 | Feb 23, 2007

v 2.01.3

Podcasts:

• Tap on the podcast icon displays menu Play/Download/Delete
• Neeews! recognizes which players support streaming and which ones do not
• Partial downloads are not automatically discarded if the download exceeds 1 MB

Other news:

• Correct handling of the return from the external viewer (Neeews! opens on the last selected article)
• New icon set (courtesy of Kenny Song) downloadable from Resco Neeews! product page
• Slight changes in the main screen in displaying the count of the unread articles

v 2.01.2

• Small fixes
• Decreasing the display dimming during the update to avoid the confusion.

GUI

• Better Html rendering
• HiRes support, incl. landscape
• View modes: By Icon / By List
• Four font sizes
• Selectable scroll step
• New Icon Manager: Currently supports icon import from Zlauncher icon sets.

New shortcuts

• Space = Toggle focus Title - Article
• Treo 680/700p: Green button opens context menu
• 'm' - open context menu (also green button on T700p/T680)
• 'r' - set article unread
• 'b' - open article in browser
• 'v' - toggle article favorite

Improved Newspaper wizard

• Simplified
• Direct access to premium services (see below)
• Optional sorting of articles by date.
  The difference is with multi-feed newspapers that use the sort order 1. feed, 2. date by default. Sorting by date only possible. (Mixing articles from different feeds.)
• Modifying the order of newspaper feeds

Web connectivity

• Offline mode: Prevents unwanted auto-download. (Eg. images, when the last update was interrupted.)
• Disconnect command
• 'Disconnect on Exit' option (General Options)
• Support for https protocol (Probably works on newer devices only; eg. T5 might fail.)

Asynchroneous update:

Here is what can you do while the newspaper update is in progress:

• Start reading updated newspaper immediately after the text of the first feed was downloaded. (The download continues on background.)
• Read other newspapers.
• Start update of another newspaper. (The updates are queued.)

Background update

• Improved Error Log
• Display dimming
• Global option to switch off background updates (General Options)
• Auto-connect dialogs are dismissed after 30 secs if possible. (Heuristical procedure mostly - if not always - successful. The purpose is to prevent phone blocking by unsuccessful connection attempt.)

External Tools

Selectable viewers:

• Resco Viewer
• Acid Image
• SplashPhoto
• GRX

Selectable players:

• AeroPlayer
• Kinoma
• mmPlayer
• mOcean
• PocketTunes
• TCPMP
• Plus built-in audio-player (available on newest Palm models)

Web browser is not selectable. Following browsers are supported in the order of preference:

1. Blazer 3.0/4.0
2. NetFront
3. Novarra WebPro
4. PalmSource Web Browser/NetFront 2.0

Memory requirements

ArticleDB applies compression on larger articles, which brings savings around 25%. (More on blogs with larger articles.)

User has control over the setup of the ArticleDB. In an extreme case the storage of latest articles can be switched off. This means that when the newspaper is closed all read articles get discarded. This is memory efficient, but implies some limitations: E.g. read articles cannot be sent or marked as favorite.

Premium Services

Support for so-called 'dynamic feeds'. Bellow is a list of providers of news, blogs, images etc. that allow a search query in a manner similar to Google. The response is a feed with matching articles, images etc.

• Google News
• Windows Live Search (former MSN search)
• Newsvine
• Reddit
• Technorati
• del.icio.us
• Flickr

Other external services:

• Bloglines account synchronization (more exactly: feed list synchronization)
  
• Improved feed search

Other changes

• Article read status added
• Image Cache dialog enables to control card space reserved to images.
• Improved rss support
• New command: SMS article
• New command: Export article to memo
• 'Update All Newspapers' command
• New Help Index

Beta 1.06 | Jan 09, 2007

Because some launchers had problems when deleting Neeews!, we changed the uninstall procedure: There is no automated removal of the card files and exported newspapers anymore. Instead, use the menu option Uninstall, that performs above cleanup.

Neeews! can now be installed on the card, too. The tradeoffs of the card installation:

• Background update will not work. (Card apps do not receive system messages.)
• If you move also the related data databases to the card (f.e. ZLauncher can do that), then the exported newspapers won't work.

New: Improved scheduler. (Same as in v1.05 log release)

Beta 1.04 | Jan 04, 2007

Bug fix in the installation procedure

Beta 1.03 | Jan 04, 2007

Bug Fixes

• In a newspaper with multiple feeds: Feed syntax error does not stop reading following feeds.
• Better handling of memory-critical situations related to the image loading

News

• Multiple feeds in a newspaper are separated by the feed title.
• New manual

Beta 1.01 | Dec 28, 2006

Bug Fixes

• Crash in Add Feed dialog when pasting a text
• Bug in Html parser that could cause skipping of some headlines (very rare case)
• Edit Newspaper action could lead to the error message "No newspaper selected"

Improvements

• Improved functionality of the Left/Right keys during scrolling
• Simplified code behind eMail Article. If you are still getting crashes, then send us please the feed URL and pointer to the headline. Plus the error message (if any).