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Thanks to @viticci‘s idea, I added a new vertical Split View on iPhone, iPad and macOS. I actually had the vertical Split View on my AppKit prototype – which went nowhere – back in the day, but I’ve completely forgotten about it since. But I’m using Mail.app in the same layout, and my RSS Reader before Fiery Feeds too, so I figured I have to add this.
Additionally, I’ve dropped my custom horizontal Split View implementations, in favour of the native UISplitView, because it has since learned to support the three column view too – which is why I had to do a custom version in the first place. You may notice a slightly different behaviour in the labouring now because of this.
The switch to the native Split View was previously planned for the 3.0 redesign, but I’m thinking more and more that there might not be a 3.0 soon, or least as a much, much smaller update. Shipping changes like this in smaller updates is just so much faster.
Second thing in this update are new icons and a new default icon – also originally planned for 3.0. There’s now a dark and a light version of each icon, and additional versions in purple, red and green. It always felt a bit arbitrary to have the icons just in blue, orange and black.
You can download the update here.
Vertical Split View:
Alternate App Icons:
Other Changes:
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Per Feed Settings
Per Folder Settings
Sync Improvements
Other Changes
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– Fixed potential crashes
– Line height defaults to 1.0 now
– Removed note about mobile password from BazQux login screen
– Added fallback logic for expired auth tokens in share extension (Wallabag, The Old Reader, Feedly)
– Fixed wrong “no articles” in widgets
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This my my fifth annual roadmap blog posts. Time really flys. You can find the last year’s post here.
This year is was not only working on Fiery Feeds, but I also tried to bring my other two, somewhat neglected, apps back up to speed. You can see a complete list of all recent updates on the new changelogs page.
All in all, I shipped 7 feature updates, and 31 updates in total across all three apps.
Fiery Feeds is still my primary focus, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. There’s also going to be an anniversary this year, Fiery Feeds 1.0 on the 10. Oct 2013, almost a decade ago. I would have never though I’d still be working on this app ten years later, but here we are. On to the next decade.
Likely the biggest feature this year was the entirely re-written subscribe flow and Safari extension, and the all around much faster feed management.
Second biggest change, even if not all that exciting, is the updated iCloud sync for feed and read later accounts. Fiery Feeds dropped support for multiple accounts of the same type within the same iCloud account, and the update had to merge any existing accounts into the new container. This worked quite smoothly, and lays the groundwork for the next performance improvements for iCloud sync.
The paid-up-front Fiery Feeds for macOS app is more. I only sold it as a standalone app, because in the first 6 months of Catalyst the App, when it was released, the App Store did not support shared subscriptions between iOS and macOS apps. The switch to a shared subscription needed to be done at some point, and with this out of the way, I’ll be able to focus on feature again.
Naturally Fiery Feeds supports the new lockscreen widgets in iOS 16 as well. You can show an article (latest or random, and it changes every couple of minutes), or the unread count of an account of your choice. Either in the slot above or below the time.
I also upgraded the article notifications. Better included actions, grouped by feed and a complete preview of the article when you view the details, powered by the native rendering engine. Some of the actions, like marking articles read or starred should even work when mirroring the notifications to your Apple watch (for those who keep asking me about an Apple Watch app).
The multi timer app Tidur Timers also switched to a shared subscription between the iOS and macOS version. I’ve re-written large parts of the iCloud syncing code, which should work now reliable between iOS, macOS and watchOS.
With the limited things allowed to do in homescreen widgets, it was quite a challenge, but I’ve added widget for the next active timers or specific timers, The same widgets are also available for the lockscreen on iOS 16.
I’ve moved my oldest app, Dozzzer, also to a subscription model. After almost 3 years not working on it, I can finally say it’s in active development again and all known bugs are fixed. It’s maybe more nostalgia to keep Dozzzer alive, it was my first successful app, and my first app being featured by Apple, almost 12 years ago.
Being an app for drifting of to sleep, it always had a pretty dark interface, but I’ve added another extra dark mode, when the system dark mode is enabled.
Slight tweaks to all the existing soundscapes, plus the new soundscapes for brown noise, Mountain Creek, Rainy Undergrowth, Lush Forrest, Hawaian Waves and Stormy Cliffs. (I like fanciful names)
Since Dozzzer can fade out the system volume and stop third party apps, I’ve added handy shortcuts to some better known audio apps right from the external music screen.
Last year I tried – and failed – doing large, completely planned out feature updates. I’ve given up on that by the middle of the year and changed my approach. I’m no longer working at one update at a time (I spend a long time doing just bug fix updates, and putting off working on new features until all the bugs are fixed), instead I’m doing the old main/develop branches and will just release a feature update whenever there’s enough new stuff to make it worth an update. I think this will mean fast, and more, but smaller feature updates for all apps.
The things I want to work for Fiery Feeds are the following, in roughly that order. I’ve already started work on the per feed settings, and I expect to ship it in the next 1-2 months, but I’ve learned not to promise any specific dates in software development.
Ability to set more options on a per feed basis, including sort order, notification settings, number of articles to keep, image caching, and so forth.
Advanced saved searches with multiple parameters, think of iTunes’ smart playlists, but for articles, and based on those saved searches, one search per account, that automatically marks articles as read. For example articles older than a specific time or articles containing a specific keyword.
I still want to do Mac-first redesign of pretty much the entire app, rewrite the feed and article list based on the lastest APIs, system sidebar, system toolbar, multi selection in the article list, dragging articles to tags to tag them and all the other expected behaviours for macOS apps. This will probably bring some improvements to the iOS as well, but I think the general layout of the iOS app doesn’t need too much change.
I’m not sure there’s really going to be a big 3.0 (even if that would be nice).
I’ll probably ship these features one by one instead, as far as possible, to avoid long stretches of no updates.
After adding new widgets, live activities are only the logical next step. After all, Apple’s timer app can do that too.
Tidur has always been the app I try out know technology. First watch app, first time I’ve used Swift, first time CloudKit sync. I want to at the very least re-write the watch app in SwiftUI, and probably bring some SwiftUI into the main app as well. I like the way the widgets look, and I can imagine using this design in the main app too.
The idea is to start existing timers right from Spotlight, the way you can start music in the Music app. Might also be interesting for Fiery Feeds, but I think Tidur is a good place to try implementing it first.
Dozzzer is in a pretty good state now, and is not going to require too many changes to the general app.
I do plan on to keep adding new soundscapes regularly though. Also having cover art on the now playing screen for each would be pretty neat.
Again, I don’t think it needs too much change, but I want to bring back the rounded time dial from pre 4.0 days. Just look how pretty it used to be.
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The second feature update of the year. Some overdue features, that have been on my todo list for too long, but with those out of the way, next up will be proper per-feed settings and advanced saved searches.
Also this is the first update where all new code is Swift, and even a few of the existing parts were re-written in Swift. By now it should be stable enough to actually work with it. ;)
The article notifications have gotten a bunch of new features. They can now be grouped by feed in the notification center, include preview images, you can long press them to get a full preview of the article (thanks to the native rendering), and they have mark read/mark starred/quick share options directly from the notification center (or Apple Watch).
There is also a new option to show a notification for a random article every couple of hours. I like to use this to remind me about articles in my somewhat neglected read later queue.
Notifications are only going to get more interesting once proper per-feed settings are available.
I’ve removed the ability to have multiple, separate, iCloud based feed and read later accounts. You can now only have one iCloud Feed account and one iCloud Read Later account. This removes the need to “import” the accounts on other devices, because I’ve seen many people having problems with iCloud based accounts because of this.
Additionally, I’ve removed the iCloud based settings backup, in favour of a simple backup file for your settings, which also includes per-feed settings now. You can still save it to iCloud Drive, but you can have multiple versions, and do everything with it, that you can do with files. I love the flexibility of regular files.
These changes took me the longest time – and they aren’t exiting in any way, but at least they’re finally done.
You can find the full changelog here: http://blog.cocoacake.net/archives/1811
OPML Import and Export
Notifications
Sharing Options
Article Sorting
App Settings
iCloud Syncing Changes
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– Reduced minimum window sizes for 2, 3 pane modes [macOS]
– Improved status icon scaling
– Added option for preview image above title
– Improved system light/dark themes
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– Fixed a potential crash with missing article titles
– Fixed loggin in to Evernote, while the app is installed [macOS]
– Fixed wrongly showing the “Not siged in status” in Feedly, Inoreader
– Fixed dismissing keyboard on done in edit tag and folder views [iOS]
– Fixed sharing text selection from inline web mode
– Fixed add article/subscribe view getting stuck (Wallabag, TTRSS, NextCloud)
– Fixed folder/tag sort order in share extension and feed detail view
– Improved performance with Bionic Reading enabled
– Improved fallback theme logic
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Version 2.6 is the first feature update in 2022, the most visible changes are a new share extension, and some interface modernisations in the app.
But it also includes a very big under the hood change, which fixes the most common crash, which in turn vastly improves how well the app restores it’s state when you return to it. (In technical terms: The user data is moved back to the app sandbox, from a shared container which the share extension, widgets and Siri Shortcuts could access. This required mostly re-writing the widgets and completely rewriting the share extension and Siri Shortcuts support. But at least it’s done now, this has been on my todo list for years.)
It seems the overall theme for this update is small changes, that require way more work than expected.
The new share extension gives you the account, feed, folder and tag selection on a single screen, with the default account being configurable simply be reordering the account list in the app. This means saving an article or subscribing to a new feed is now a one tap action, instead of a three step process as it was before.
For most web based services the new article or feed are immediately pushed to the service, but for local accounts – since it can’t access the main data – this now happens when you launch the main app the next time.
The same new interface is also available inside the main app, of course. But I didn’t stop there. There are new dialogs for creating new folders, new tags, or editing folders, tags or feeds.
The New Folder screen allows you to create a new folder and simply select all feed feeds you want in this folder right there. It’s also now possible to do this right from the main list, since many users did not find the new folder option in the “move feed screen”. It’s still possible to add new folders when assigning folders to a specific feed too of course.
The new Feed Details screen combines renaming the feed, exposing the feed url and site url – which is also new – and assigning folders, which was the previous move feed screen.
Editing a folder allows the reverse, i.e. assigning feeds to a specific folder or renaming the folder, and the new Edit Tag screen works the same way with articles.
Additionally there are some other UI modernisations, like the inset grouped style in much of settings and edit screens, and the macOS app now uses the “Optimised for Mac” style, that is it no longer scales down an iPad size apps, but renders everything in the correct size, which required adjusting each button, label and other element on screen to be a bit smaller, otherwise the app would look comically large on Macs. But it has the advantage of some AppKit style elements like the checkboxes in settings, and more importantly the text should be much less blurry, especially on non-retina displays.
Related to the new feed management UI, there are also many changes to the sync code to each of the now 20 supported sync services. All feed management changes are now applied to the local database after pushing them to the services, without needing the annoying sync after every change. Not a huge change by itself, but I kept putting it off, because doing the change for each service, 20 times in total was quite a bit of work.
This means that applying changes not only takes fewer steps in the UI, but also is simply faster.
The second big new things, is the shared subscription. As I have already mentioned in my roadmap post, there is now a shared subscription for both iOS and macOS at a new price of €14.99/year.
Because the subscription is aimed at power users and unlocks the pro features, I took this opportunity to rename the subscription to Fiery Feeds Pro. This name change has no impact on existing subscriptions.
You can download the new macOS app here, and especially if you already have a subscription on iOS, I’d recommend switching to the new app now, so you don’t have to migrate your data once version 3.0 is released.
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This is the fourth of my yearly roadmap blog posts. You can find the last year’s post here.
The roadmap for 2021 may have been a bit overambitious, and combined with some changes in my day job, I was not as productive as I had hoped. While I did manage to ship 16 updates, including one large feature update, the rest of the planned big features pretty much move to this year.
Completely revamped the default themes, and moved more and more to SF Symbols.
Full support for the new iOS home screen widgets, with 5 different types in 4 different sizes, including extra large for iPads.
Added a full editor for custom themes, change the theme directory from a website to a native list, including previews, and added the required server support for users submitting their own themes.
In addition to a bunch of new expert settings like opening all folders by default in the feed list, the “expert mode” which enables over 60 additional options in settings, can now easily be enabled/disabled in the general settings. And the searchbar in settings can find them even if expert settings are hidden.
Since the last yearly plan changed so much, I’ll try to at least outline the next planned versions, without tying them to 2022 particularly. As always, the following is just a rough plan, and will probably change over the next year, but this is where things stand right now.
One of the biggest changes will be the switch to a combined subscription for iOS + macOS, since this is now supported by Apple. I’ll follow the same playbook, as I did when switching the iOS to subscription. The subscription based Mac app will be a separate download, and the one time purchase will continue to be available for a while, I’ll remove it from sale 3-6 months before the release of 3.0, but it will continue to receive up until 3.0. The subscription price will stay at $9.99 for a while as upgrade pricing before going up to $14.99 since it now includes the macOS app as well. Every subscriber will stay at their subscribed price until cancelled, so you can lock in a good deal before the price goes up.
I’ve already been working on v2.6 for the past few months, and the planned features just kept growing. Everything up to 3.0 was originally planned for 2.6, but I’ve split it up into multiple releases, so I can get them out faster.
The first thing is a fix for the most common background crash (think >90% of all crashes), which required moving the local database back to the app container, which in turn required completely rewriting Siri Shortcuts and the sharing action for Safari.
Since I’m already re-doing on the new subscribe/save view, I decided to also redo all of the feed management code, which means all feed management operations will be much faster and will no longer require syncing for the changes to show up.
Version 2.6 will be the first version to be available on the shared subscription on macOS, and also finally drop the 70% scaling which is standard for Catalyst apps, but this also required me to go through the entire app, and adjust every view, every button to not be comically large on macOS, but it should lead to crisper text on macOS.
Version 2.7 is all about syncing, and especially the new services require the feed management changes from 2.6, to avoid doing too much work twice.
Improvements for TTRSS, FreshRSS, new services like Raindrop, miniflux or feeder. A re-structuring of the local database to improve performance with > 20.000 articles on device.
Better notifications, including an article preview (for individual article notifications), and options to star or mark the for reading later.
I’ll likely drop support for iCloud account settings and app settings sync in favour of json import/export. Since this will work more reliable and can be used as backup as well. The ability to sync feeds/read later will of course continue to exist, but will be limited to one feed and one read later account per iCloud account, since I’ve seen far too many users who set up multiple iCloud feed accounts by accident.
The advanced users update. Okay, with Fiery Feeds almost every update is for advanced users, but I wanted a tag line.
Ability to set more options on a per feed basis, including sort order, notification settings, number of articles to keep, image caching, and so forth.
Advanced saved searches with multiple parameters, think of iTunes’ smart playlists, but for articles, and based on those saved searches, one search per account, that automatically marks articles as read. For example articles older than a specific time or articles containing a specific keyword.
I’m already including version 3.0 here, and if all goes well, I might even start working on 3.0 in 2022, but I don’t expect a release this year.
It’s going to be a Mac-first redesign of pretty much the entire app, rewriting feed and article list based on the lastest APIs, system sidebar, system toolbar, multi selection in the article list, dragging articles to tags to tag them and all the other expected behaviours for macOS apps.
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Home Screen Widgets
Updated Color Themes
Updated Font Handling
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Fiery Feeds 2.5 is the first feature release in 2021. The big one is widgets, but it also includes a complete rewrite of the font and theming system, which was long overdue. And with this version native rendering is now the default render mode for articles.
The first thing you’ll probably notice are the two new default themes. The retain a slight blue shade and the red accent of the previous default theme, but they are overall much lighter and much darker, respectively. The old default themes haven’t changed much since version 1.0 almost 8 years ago.
The probably most requested feature are home screen widgets. The are widgets for single or multiple articles, single or multiple accounts and Hot Links, in all relevant sizes. You can even add multiple widgets of the same type and configure them individually.
And of course the widgets are fully configurable. You can pick the account/folder/feed you want to have displayed in the articles widget, and decide which articles you want displayed.
I’ve been meaning to do a random article widget for a long time, to suggest articles from my read later list every time I look at my phone. This was a good time to finally do it.
I’ve cleaned the theme file structure up a bit. It is still a JSON file, but comments are no longer allowed inside the file and some of the keys have changed. The macOS version still has a few extra keys, but all other keys have been unified, and the new default themes are the same on both iOS and macOS. There are also no longer default values for each color, so every theme needs to contain a color for
I’m no longer documenting all of the used keys explicitly, but you can still read the file with an text editor (the keys are pretty self explainatory). The reason why, is because Fiery Feeds now finally includes an integrated theme editor, allowing you to modify your themes right inside the app.
In addition to the theme editor there is a new, completely native theme directory, and you can submit your own creations to the directory to share them with other users right from inside the app.
And finally, even if it sounds like a simple change, but I’ve almost completely rewritten the font handling inside Fiery Feeds. This means that the app respects the default system font size (by default – you can still override it for each part of Fiery Feeds, like previously), and you can select any installed font, including fonts installed by third party apps.
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