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This is the third of my yearly roadmap blog posts. You can find the last year’s post here.
2020 was a complicated year for everyone, but I still managed to release 16 updates for Fiery Feeds iOS and macOS in total.
It was the first thing on my list for 2020, and you can download it here: Fiery Feeds Trial
Search everywhere. Full text search for articles. Search for settings, including otherwise hidden expert settings.
Also in version 2.4 a simple implementation of saved searches. It’s not yet the advanced iTunes smart playlist style saved searches, but a lot of things required are now in place for this to happen.
I’m still working on the native article renderer and fixing some edge cases here and there, but it is officially an option, and will become the default renderer in the next major update.
There were some performance fixes since 2.4 has been released and I am currently working on a few different more, as well as general code cleanup. Those changes will be part of the coming 2.4.x updates, that is, I want all of the known bottlenecks fixed before I start on the next feature release.
The major features I’m planning to work on this year, roughly sorted by priority. As always, this is just a rough plan, not a guarantee that I’ll actually manage to implement all of them.
iOS 14 and Big Sure brought support for new SwiftUI based widgets. Fiery Feeds already has a today widget, but the new widgets, while more limited in features, can be put on the Home Screen, which people seem to enjoy. I have some ideas for different kinds of widgets I want to support, but I do have to learn SwiftUI first, which feels like a big thing (most of Fiery Feeds is still Objective-C). Still, this is something for version 2.5.
Miniflux, Raindrop, Feeder.io, full FreshRSS (including feed management, i.e. using their Google Reader API) support. There’s a lot to do on the syncing side, even if it doesn’t sound like exciting new features.
A better (read native, instead of a website) in-app browser for themes, an in-app theme editor and a user directory of themes where anyone can submit their own creations.
While I don’t want to completely redesign Fiery Feeds, I do want to bring it a bit closer to the look of iOS 14 and Big Sur.
Also the new OS versions brought support for a lot of things I want to use. Native sidebar, native 3-pane-mode, the new window toolbar on macOS, more use of SF Symbols,… you get the idea. Some of those do require iOS 14/Big Sur as target, that means I’m going to release this after the next iOS/macOS versions are available so I can keep supporting to my usual current + 1 OS versions.
One of the more macOS centered improvements. Selecting multiple article to mark read or tag at once, or simply dragging feeds / articles to folders / tags to assign them is something I’d expect from a Mac app. I’ve caught myself trying to do this and getting annoyed that it doesn’t work multiple times. Interestingly I’ve never missed those features on iOS – I still plan on supporting it on both platforms.
I think this is going to fit well with the updated design, since I have to completely re-do at least the feeds and folders list anyway.
Like I said above, the foundation is already in place, but I still need to build the UI to create more complex saved searches. I like iTunes’ UI for smart playlists, and I hope that Smart Searches will end up looking and working like that.
Over the time people have asked for different settings they want only on a per feed basis, not for the entire app. Showing Preview Images for example, or notifications only for specific feeds. Alongside that I also want to support automatically marked articles read after a certain time (for specific feeds), and some more.
Those will be ‘override’ settings, that is, if you never look into the feed settings view, the app should continue to behave exactly as it does today.
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The most requested feature is finally here, full text search for all your articles.
You can either search all articles in the feeds and folders list, and see the number of results in each feed or folder, or you can filter the article list directly within a feed or folder.
You can create saved searches directly from the article list, which will then appear like folders in the main feeds & folders list. The saved searches run locally on device for your articles, but where it’s supported (Inoreader on a paid plan or Feedbin) you’ll also have the option to create a server side search that is synced across your devices. Saved searches are also synced for iCloud feed and iCloud read later accounts.
Local saved searches even store and respect the current feed or folder where they are created and only show matching articles from these sources. You can of course create a saved search from the “All Articles” feed to get all of them too.
This feature is a bit overdue, but since I was already well into 2.4 when Apple released cursor support for the iPad, I decided to do it right and release it together with the rest of the new features. Most of the app was already working reasonably. because of Catalyst, but I’ve added some animations and hover states that are only available on iOS.
Plus some of the improved cursor support, like displaying URLs while hovering links, in the article view is only available with the new native rendering, that’s also officially supported now.
Native Rendering is a new option to display the article. I’ve been working on it for the past year or so, and it will replace the WKWebView based rendering at some point. Instead of just throwing the article’s HTML content simply into a WebView, Fiery Feeds parses the HTML itself and displays it using native labels, images and so forth.
This is not only much faster – not that I’m better at rendering HTML than the Safari team, but since it’s only used for articles, I can completely ignore any javascript, any CSS, any more advanced layouts, and only implement the elements commonly used in articles – it also gives me more control over the individual elements. You’ll notice context menus with more options, better drag and drop, images can be downloaded really on demand and use the same cache regardless of if they’re loaded during sync or when viewed in an article, iframes can be set to only load when needed, and much more.
The new native article viewer has also an updated design for most elements, giving it a more modern look.
I had to push back some of the features planned for version 2.4, to be able to release if before iOS 14 / Big Sur hits. Now that 2.4 is done, I’m going to focus on version 2.5 with initial support for iOS 14 and Big Sur, that is enough changes to make it run well on the new operating systems, but not much in terms of updated UI for Big Sur. Plus some of the smaller features I had to drop from version 2.4, depending on how much time is left until the public release. Version 2.5 should be available around the time iOS 14 / Big Sur drops.
Of the big features originally planned in the roadmap for 2020, four (Mac Trial, Full Text Search, Saved Searches and native rendering) are now released. I’m going to continue to work on Performance improvements, but I’m pushing per feed settings and drag and drop/Multi Selection to next year.
Instead, for the rest of the year, I’m going to work on replacing as much of the Fiery Feeds’ custom UI elements with some of the new system elements (like the collapsible sidebars on iPads, the new 3 pane mode for SplitViews, Big Sur’s new window toolbar, using SF Symbols instead of custom icons more and more …) to get version 2.6 to fit in to Big Sur as much as possible.
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This is the second of my now yearly roadmap blog posts. You can find the last year’s post here.
Looking at my commit history for the last few years, 2019 was actually the busiest year so far.
All in all there were 19 updates for iOS and 3 for macOS. As always you can find the entire changelog here.
In preparation for the Catalyst Mac app, I’ve started the year implementing the three pane view on iPads.
Looking back this was a good idea, there were more than enough other things to do to get the macOS app ready in time for Catalina, so it was nice to have this out of the way early.
One of the more requested features was a way to use Fiery Feeds without having to signup for a third party service.
Version 2.2 added an integrated RSS parser that allows you to subscribe to feeds without having to rely on any server or service. The feeds are downloaded and parsed on device (the way traditional RSS readers work).
Because I noticed that a lot of the things needed for a read later service, from text extraction to database code, were already in place, version 2.2 also added an integrated read later account.
I didn’t stop with local accounts, instead if added iCloud syncing to both the RSS and read later accounts. Since the database structure is shared between all account types, I can even use the same iCloud sync code for both types of accounts. And, while I was at it, I’ve added support for syncing the app and account settings through iCloud as well.
Later I’ve also added support for syncing with NextCloud News.
New is also support for article tags, creating new tags and adding tags to an article. It’s only supported by some services, but it made sense to implement it now, since they’re now also used it in local/iCloud accounts.
Fiery Feeds learned Siri Shortcuts with parameters, allowing you scripting access to your feeds and articles. You could search for articles or save all starred article from a particular folder to your notes, or whatever you want. (Do let me know if you’re doing something interesting!)
This year also brought Bionic Reading to Fiery Feeds. It highlights parts of words to guide the eye through the text.
Another new feature in iOS 13 are full page screenshots. When you take a screenshot of an article, you’ll now have the option to save or annotate a PDF of the entire articles (even if it’s longer than what’s on the screen). Just take a screenshot, and then choose Full Page in the system’s screenshot UI.
After iOS 12 which required nearly no changes to the code, iOS 13 brought (mostly due to Catalyst – most of the new features in the iOS version were required for the Mac) some massive changes.
But at least there is now a working, and fairly usable macOS version of Fiery Feeds. It’s not perfect yet, and there are still lots of bigger and smaller improvements planned for it, but if you like your RSS app configurable, it might already be the option out there.
Both the Mac app and the iOS 13 update were much more work then expected, so I had to push some of the planned features to 2020. Full text search and saved searches in particular.
Here are the things planned for 2020, in no particular order. (And I want to emphasise that they are only planned. Plans change sometimes.)
Fiery Feeds for macOS is sold separately from the iOS as a €35 one time purchase. I understand that you might want to try the app before buying it, so the first thing in 2020 will be a trial version.
As mentioned before, full text search was originally planned for 2019. It’s been pushed to 2020 and should be in the first feature update for iOS and macOS this year.
Once it’s possible to search for text, it’d be nice to save those searches for quick access. I’m thinking of something along the lines of iTunes’ smart playlists to create powerful smart views, possibly even across multiple accounts.
Another big feature that’s coming sooner than later. Instead of relying on an embedded web view to render the article content, I’m parsing the content myself, and drawing it with standard UIKit labels and images to the screen. This is not only a lot faster, it also gives me much more control over the content (think useful context menus, or loading images only when needed, to save bandwidth).
You can even try it out already, if you want. Just open the Expert Settings by tapping and holding the settings button, then look into the ‘Experimental’ settings. There are still a few things missing, most notably text selection, but it’s coming along.
One of the more macOS centered improvements. Selecting multiple article to mark read or tag at once, or simply dragging feeds / articles to folders / tags to assign them is something I’d expect from a Mac app. I’ve caught myself trying to do this and getting annoyed that it doesn’t work multiple times. Interestingly I’ve never missed those features on iOS – I still plan on supporting it on both platforms.
Over the time people have asked for different settings they want only on a per feed basis, not for the entire app. Showing Preview Images for example, or notifications only for specific feeds. Alongside that I also want to support automatically marked articles read after a certain time (for specific feeds), and some more.
Those will be ‘override’ settings, that is, if you never look into the feed settings view, the app should continue to behave exactly as it does today.
And lastly, 2019 had some massive features and changes (and you might notice that the features planned for 2020 are quite a bit smaller in scope), this year I want to focus more on general performance and stability. Sound boring, I know, but I have quite the backlog of smaller issues, and ideas of where I could make the app a bit faster.
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Fiery Feeds for Mac offers the same customisability as you’re used to. It’s build using Catalyst and on the same code base as the iOS version. I’ve written some more about it here.
It offers the same customisability as you’re used to in the iOS version, including multiple article list styles, custom themes, custom URL and Email actions, iCloud synchronisation, smart views, automatic full text extraction and all the rest.
The system wide action extension to subscribe or read later is coming in one of the next updates. It’s already working in my development builds, but I haven’t managed to convince the App Store servers to accept uploads with the extensions embedded. Let’s see if that changes after the official Catalina release, wouldn’t be the first time that the App Store isn’t quite up to date.
The new Bionic Reading feature from version 2.3 is also available on the Mac.
I’ve thought long about how to price the Mac version. The most obvious option would be to make it part of the subscription that already exists on iOS, but this comes with some technical issues. The Mac and the iOS/iPadOS apps are two separate apps on the App Store (since universal apps between iOS and Mac are not supported). Apple allows syncing the subscription between separate apps, but doesn’t provide any help in doing so.
Right now there is only a single subscription (group) available in Fiery Feeds. That means, no matter what, a single Apple ID can not subscribe more than once. If I wanted to do subscription syncing, I’d have to at least offer a separate (because it’s separate app) subscription in the Mac app (for people who do not use the iOS app), which means users might subscribe twice by accident (if they didn’t follow the steps to synchronise the subscription from the iOS app exactly step by step). Together, with the fact that I can’t refund subscriptions (or purchases) even if I wanted to, that sounds like a support nightmare in the making. So a shared subscription is out, at least until it’s properly supported by the App Store.
Generally requiring a second subscription for the Mac app for everyone… feels just wrong. So that’s out too.
That leaves me with probably the most straightforward option. Fiery Feeds for Mac will be a single, paid upfront, onetime purchase, as Mac apps have been for a long time. It’s going to be $35 and I expect to support it with new updates and features for the next 3-5 years, before doing some sort of paid upgrade, be that a move to a subscription (if supported by Apple), or another paid version.
You can find Fiery Feeds on the Mac App Store.
I’ve posted a few things here and there about the progress on the Mac app during development on twitter. I’ll try to add a few more words here.
Getting an initial version of the iPad app to run on macOS was relatively straightforward. It did not look particularly good (or mac like) though. Luckily I’ve started working towards the Mac app, when Apple announced Catalyst last year, and the 3 pane view was already done.
After adding a stretching mode the the toolbars, and disabling the large titles, it’s getting a little bit better. Both navigation bar and toolbar are custom implementations, since I’ve had far too many issues with the standard classes in iOS over the years. I’m quite happy I did it this way.
Multi window support is also a must on macOS, even more so than on iPad. It’s nice that implementing windows for the Catalyst app, also gave me multi window support on iPad for free, basically. But on macOS I’m using it a bit more, by default. For example the settings above are always opened in a separate window (as they should be), or if the main window with the article list is too small to show the three pane mode, it defaults to opening articles in separate windows as well (although this can be changed in the settings).
And of course menus. I’ve spend a lot of time switch everything to the new context menus (which are weirdly similar to my own long press menu from version 2.2), except of course, that they get translated to actually context menus on the Mac. And the menu bar, of course, it wouldn’t be a Mac app without it. While at it, I’ve completely rewritten the handling of keyboard shortcuts, which were kind of hacky before.
Additionally to the keyboard shortcuts, I’ve also completely rewritten the background sync using the newest APIs. You probably shouldn’t notice any change on iOS, but it was still necessary to get background sync working on Mac as well.
Finally, I’m using an AppKit bundle for some of the smaller details. Like the nice and entered traffic lights on the (custom) window titlebar wouldn’t be possible without AppKit. Or setting the window size for the image viewer correctly. Or even the web view wouldn’t show the click pointer on links without doing that manually (though this might have been fixed in one of the later Catalina betas. Haven’t checked).
All in all, I see this first release more as the beginning of a journey than the final step.
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Fiery Feeds 2.3 brings support for all the new iOS 13 features and some more.
I’ve completely replaced the old custom long press menu with the new context menus everywhere (and added menus in lots of new places).
First off, the article view now supports Bionic Reading. It allows you to read long texts with more focus, awareness, and sustainability. You can read more details on how Bionic Reading works here.
Fiery Feeds now supports two way syncing with selfhosted Nextcloud News installations.
Fiery Feeds now fully supports multiple windows on iPad running iOS 13 or later. You can open different accounts in different windows, you can also drag individual articles to open them in separate windows.
Siri Shortcuts with parameters are an extremely cool feature. I’m not thinking about them as much as things to say to Siri, and more like a bridge to allow scripting with Fiery Feeds. I’ve added shortcuts to fetch article ids from certain feeds or folders and to fetch article attributes (like title, body, author and so forth) for an article. And shortcuts to tag articles or mark them starred/read. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all do with this.
As an example, here’s a short script that searches the “Must Read” folder for any article that contains “Apple” and tags the article.
You can still select your preferred dark and light mode, but now you have the option for the app to follow the selected systemwide mode, instead of following the screen brightness.
Version 2.3 also includes completely rewritten (and streamlined) keyboard shortcuts code and background sync using the newest APIs (which should reduce background battery usage), but you should not notice too much of these changes.
Some of my favourite little changes are the new two column settings view on iPads and that you can tap and hold any of the bottom toolbars to quickly customise them.
There is one other thing hidden in this version. I’ve been working on the next generation of my article viewer for the past few months. With this new article view, I’m parsing the HTML for the article myself, and render the content using native elements, instead of throwing everything into a web view. It’s far from finished, but what’s there is already so much better (and much faster!) than the web view based rendering that’s currently on by default.
If you want to give it a shot, you can open the Expert Settings by tapping and holding the settings button, then look into the ‘Experimental’ settings. Let me know what you think :)
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Fiery Feeds has lots of settings. There are the Expert Settings I’ve written about previously, there are the general app settings. And there are also the often overlooked account settings.
The account settings not include the login information, but also some additional operations like importing or exporting OPML files (in iCloud or local accounts).
You can how many and which of your articles should be downloaded to your device, and how many and which articles should cache additional data. You can choose whether you want all starred articles, and how many already read articles you want to have available on your device.
You can also choose which (unread, read or starred) and how many, at most, of your articles should be cached. Fiery Feeds always keeps the selected number of the newest articles with the selected states cached, and removes older articles, even if still unread from it’s cache.
Note that caching the article here is different from downloading the article. A downloaded articles shows up in the app, and has the in the RSS feed included article text available offline. For a cached article, the extracted article text (for text mode) as well as any image included in the article is downloaded and available offline. Both are downloaded on demand for any downloaded, but not cached article.
Here you can choose whether to include the unread count in the app icon badge. (The unread counts of all accounts with this setting enabled are added together).
You can also choose if you want to receive detailed notifications for each new article (and wether you want to receive them inside the app, or only in the Notification Center. Note that the notifications inside the app only show for at most 5 articles, as to not block the UI for too long).
You can also choose to receive a sync summary (“6 new articles found”) as notification.
Here you can enable or disable any of the smart views, as well as setting the threshold for the long and short article folders, for the high and low frequency folders, and the number of days to be shown in the recents folder.
Choose when articles should be automatically marked read. Available options are on opening in the article view, on scrolling past them in the article list, or on triggering the quick share action.
In the account interface settings, you can fully configure the bottom toolbars for the feed list, the article list, the Hot Links and article view. Additionally you can turn or or off showing word counts in the article list, as well as left/right swiping and saving the reading progress in the article view.
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Synching the general app settings is easy, you just need to enable “Sync App Settings” in Settings > iCloud and Backup. Note the selected color theme setting is exclude (since any custom theme file is not part of the settings, and might not be installed on other devices), as well as the selected layout (1, 2 or 3 panes), since that is very device depended.
If you find that any of your settings are not synchronised (this can happen after initially turning on “Sync App Settings”), you can try toggling them on one device. Since Fiery Feeds only synchronises settings when they’re changed, editing the setting, even if you set it back to its original value, will cause it to be synced to other devices again.
Alternatively, you can also use the “Rebuild iCloud Database” button in Settings > iCloud & Backup, to delete and reupload everything to iCloud, including all settings. Afterwards, use the “Replace Local Settings” button on your other devices to make sure all of the settings from iCloud are downloaded.
The app settings are synchronised with iCloud whenever you tap the “Synchronise Now” button in Settings > iCloud & Backup, when you manually trigger a sync in either the feed, article or accounts list, or when a background sync happens.
Synchronising account settings is a little bit more involved, since Fiery Feeds supports more than one account of the same type, and the settings should obviously only sync to the corresponding account.
To start you need to add your account on one, and only one device. Make sure to enable “Sync Accounts” in iCloud & Backup, and tap the “Synchronise Now” button, in case your account isn’t already listed under “Accounts in iCloud”. Then, on your other devices, remove all previously set up accounts, and import the account you’ve added to iCloud either in Settings > iCloud & Backup, or by adding a new account from the accounts list (the accounts found in iCloud are displayed at the top of the list).
After that, the account settings will be synchronised with iCloud, every time the account is synced, as long as “Sync Accounts” is enabled.
If you are experiencing issues, you can also use the “Rebuild iCloud Database” to reupload all data from one device to iCloud. Make sure to synchronise the account on the device, with the data you want to use, before synchronising on your other devices.
Note that purely local accounts do not support synchronising settings, and are not added to iCloud, to avoid confusion (when the account is listed in iCloud, but the feeds and articles are not synchronised).
If you want to delete an account, and all associated data from iCloud, delete it first from all of your devices (so it isn’t reuploaded automatically), then delete it from iCloud by swiping left on the account in iCloud & Backup.
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The new 3 pane view is not only a preparation for the eventual Mac app, but only works really great on the large iPads. There’s also the option to hide the feed list, to get the much requested view with the article list on one side, and the detailed article view on the other.
In addition to the three pane view for iPads, there’s also a big change in the interface for all devices: I’ve switched to a long press to open the menu for any items, instead of the right swipe it was before.
Not only is there more space to properly show all options, but it also free the right swipe gesture everywhere on the screen. And now that the swipe right action is free on all screens, I’ve used it to allow swiping back to the previous screen anywhere, not just from the screen edge.
As you can there are now two more actions available on articles (if supported by the sync service), namely tag article and delete article. That means full tagging support in Feedly, Bazqux as well as in Fiery Feed accounts.
The second new feature, and probably most requested feature so far, is also finally here: Completely local accounts. There is no longer a need for a third party sync service, just to use Fiery Feeds.
There are two types of local accounts, first there’s the feed account, which let’s you subscribe to to rss and atom feeds. And there’s also a read later account which let’s you save articles for a later date. Fiery Feeds will use its text extraction service to automatically download the text version of every added article.
You can add articles not only from within Fiery Feeds (with a swipe action for example), but also using the completely redesigned share extension from any other app, including Safari.
Since you might be using more than one device, you can also create iCloud based accounts, instead of just local accounts. Both feed and read later accounts are also available in an iCloud syncing variant, which synchronise your content between all of your iOS devices.
In addition to synching your content, version 2.2 also adds the option to synchronise all app settings, as well as account and feed settings (like the selected view mode for each feed). When you launch Fiery Feeds the first time on a new device you can also import your existing accounts from other devices with a single tap.
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As a new year begins I want to pause for a moment and reflect on the past year’s accomplishments and to share a roadmap of the plans for the new year.
2018 was a big year for Fiery Feeds. Two major updates and its fifth birthday (it’s really been already 5 years since version 1.0, I can’t believe how fast that went). I’ve added a ton of new features this year, you can see them in the entire changelog, but I’m going to highlight the biggest features here.
First there was the big 2.0 update, which completed the transition to a free app with a $9.99 per year subscription for additional features.
The subscription is working really well, even if the first year isn’t up yet, and the yearly subscriptions not renewing yet. It’s almost as if letting users try the app first is a good thing.
Maybe the biggest feature this year are the so called Smart Views.
There is the Hot Links Smart View, which highlights the most linked to websites in your Feeds (a first in iOS RSS Readers), there are Smart Views based on the posting frequency, Smart Views for particularly long or short articles, a view for articles published today, and a specially highlighted Must Read folder, for the most important feeds.
I’ve also brought the app up to speed with all of the new features in iOS that have been missing before 2.0. This included 3D Touch, Drag and Drop on iPad, Continuity to quickly open articles on other devices, Haptic Feedback and State Restoration.
But the most important thing was cleaning up the code base and bringing it to a state, I can build upon for the next few years. This allowed features link 3D Touch or the new layout, and some of the coming features.
It started in version 2.0 with an improved layout, and was completed in 2.1 with completely redrawn icons and a ton of smaller interface improvements and polish across the entire app.
One of the most requested feature is automatic switching between a light and a dark theme. You can now select the dark and light themes of your choice, and switch between them either based on the screen brightness, or with a double tap on the navigationbar.
A rather hidden features, but maybe my personal favourite are folder groups. By naming feeds or folders in the form of “group/name”, they are grouped together in the feed list in Fiery Feeds, and because that name is synced to all your devices, these groups are automatically available everywhere.
Additionally I’ve added full two way syncing for FreshRSS, a self hosted RSS reader, and Pinboard, as a new Read-It-Later Service in Fiery Feeds.
Future plans are always subject to change, of course, but here’s the biggest feature I would like to add to Fiery Feeds next year (throughout two or three feature updates).
More layout options, including a 3 pane layout, on larger iPads. This a more desktop-like layout, and it’s also a bit of preparation for an eventual Marzipan Mac app.
Exactly what it says. An RSS account that’s not tied to any sync service or server. The app already supports the required feed management, but since that is a Premium feature, and a standalone account without the ability to add new feeds is rather pointless, the standalone account is likely going to be a Premium feature as well.
Fiery Feeds already offers text extraction for any website, building upon that, a standalone read it later account shouldn’t be too hard to implement. Given that it also requires feed management, as well as text extraction, this is also going to be a Premium feature.
Fiery Feeds has a lot of settings. To make it easier to manage them across multiple device, I’m planning to add iCloud sync for settings. This includes all app-wide settings, as well as accounts (without login information though) and per-account settings, including article states in RSS accounts and saved links and states in read later accounts.
Full Text search for articles in feeds, folders or the entire account. Search for options in settings. Support for searching articles using Spotlight.
By saved searches I don’t mean just simple search strings, instead I’m planning something powerful enough to replace all current Smart Views (except Hot Links). That is, multiple parameters to include or exclude certain articles based on search strings, published date, article length and so forth.
And finally, I’m waiting for Apple to release more information on UIKit on Mac, codenamed ‘Marzipan’. I’ve been meaning to do a Mac app for a while, but given that I’m a solo developer and time constraints, it’s simply not feasible to rebuild the entire UI in App Kit, but if I can reuse parts of the existing UI, that calculation changes. And I’m quite hopeful that it’s going to be possible to build a good Mac app using Marzipan, it is publicly available (after all, that’s more than a year of work on UIKit / Mac, compared to the current News and Home apps).
Fiery Feeds is known to be very configurable, and there a quite a few settings to be found in the settings view. What is maybe less known, is that you can long press the settings icon, to open the Expert Settings, instead of the regular Settings view.
The Expert Settings screen contains a bunch of settings, that are not important enough to make it into the regular Settings view, since I don’t want to the settings screen to become unwieldy, with too many options, that hardly anyone uses. It also contains some more experimental options, that I might remove at some point later.
The All Settings group simply lists all available settings in the app, unless you know what you’re looking for, this is probably not very useful to you.
I want to highlight some of the more interesting options in the Expert Settings view.
Share Full Text : This option allows you to share the full article text, instead of just the title, when using the system share sheet. Note that not all apps support this, and some apps will not show up in the share sheet, if this option is enabled.
Open Web View Links in Safari View : Opens links clicked in an article in web mode in Safari View. Links opened from article or text mode are always opened in Safari View. This setting is disabled by default, since the web view and Safari View do not share their cookies, and it would be impossible to login to a paywalled website, if the login link opened in Safari.
Article View Web Mode Reset Cookies : Automatically clears the cookies whenever an article is opened in web mode. Useful for some websites that only allow to view a limited number of articles.
Zooming in Article View : Zooming in web mode is always enabled, this settings allows you to zoom in article or text mode as well.
Article View Presentation : Open the article view fullscreen (default on iPhone) or small spaces left and right (default on iPad).
Dynamic Height in Articles : Disabling this causes each article to use the exact same height in the article list. This increases performance, and might be easier to read for some, but it can leave empty spaces, if there is not enough preview text for some articles.
Show Micro Blog Titles : Displays the blog name instead of the post title for titleless posts. This makes a list of microblog posts feel more like Twitter. On by default.
Reduce Visual Effects : Removes a couple of animations, and visual effects like the blurred background in lots of places. Disabling can increase the performance, especially on older devices.
Prefer AMP Pages : Shows the AMP page in web mode, if available. AMP pages are a lot faster to load, but this requires a call to Google’s repository of AMP sites before opening a website, which has privacy implications (it’s off by default).
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