1.2 available, get it while it’s hot
February 3, 2009 by kidjan · 22 Comments
Like the title says: 1.2 is out. We added a new explore feature which will recommend feeds, vastly improved interfaces for adding feeds through auto discovery and explore, numerous bug fixes, landscape view, etc.
Let us know what you like, what you want (or still want–sorry, we didn’t get everything, but we track every suggestion made for DaisyFeed), what works, and what doesn’t. Any news for us is good news.
Thanks again, and enjoy Daisy Feed 1.2 
Daisy Feed 1.2 submitted to Apple
January 28, 2009 by kidjan · 3 Comments
Our next version has been submitted to Apple. We hope this is the best release yet; we added new features and hopefully have resolved the crashing issues people have been encountering with the default feed.
If you’ve suffered the crash: please give us another chance! We really do want to make Daisy Feed the best RSS reader available for the iPhone, and your feedback is the best resource at our disposal.
Thanks for your continued support!
A sneak peak at 1.2
January 14, 2009 by kidjan · 1 Comment
We’re putting some final elbow grease into 1.2 and wanted to give everyone a sneak peak at what’s in store:
- We’ve added an “explore” feature, which makes use of the very-especially-extra nice AideRSS features to suggest popular feeds.
- The crash at start up has been resolved. Our sincere apologies to everyone who suffered through this problem and extra thanks to users who helped us isolate the problem (techno babble: naughty apple XML + naughty XML parser = doh!); please give the app another try!
- The brief item viewer has been improved; it now has landscape view and a progress indicator (screen shots below).
- Adding feeds through the AutoDiscovery and Explore features has been improved; it now shows a listing of feeds and allows you to pick and choose which ones to add.
- A warning when zapping the database to double-check that user actually wants to do that, and understands what it means.
- Numerous fixes for specific websites (if you have a site not working for you, please let us know!)
- We’re going to try to sneak in a few more requested changes.
Here’s a shot of Dinosaur Comics (which, btw, we are huge fans of) in landscape view:
This page also includes a progress indicator, which is nice when you’re on slower networks or loading pages with lots of graphics.
Here’s a shot of the new AutoDiscovery “add” page:
Once DaisyFeed locates feeds, it displays them and you can pick and choose which feeds to add (in the above picture, we only selected the Atom feed to add, but we could choose both). By clicking the blue arrow, you can edit the details of that particular feed.
Here’s the new explore page:
These are feeds that were recommended (we’re computer nerds, so apologies in advance for content). It has the same mechanism to select and add feeds as the AutoDiscovery page.
As always, feedback is both welcome and appreciated–let us know what you think!
The Real World
December 2, 2008 by kidjan · 5 Comments
Between moving, work, school and other tedious distractions that keep us from the things we love (i.e. writing code until our eyes bleed) we have not been too active lately. But we’re getting back in gear to crank out another release of DaisyFeed, and we need your help.
Give us all your feature requests! Thus far, I see:
- Refresh all feed categories with a single click.
- The option of having the default start page be something other than favorites.
- Ability to copy a feed definition for several feeds from the same site.
- Ability to “bookmark” or “save” posts.
- No crashy-crashy on upgrade (still looking into this–it’s a tough nut to crack)
- Better OPML support/Google Reader integration
- Stability fixes for specific sites?
- Allow a max items setting, either per feed or overall. This is to help with sites that have a lot of items.
- Add an option to cache full story content so even the actual page can be viewed offline.
- Add a confirmation to the “Erase All” feature, letting user know it’s going to toast everything. (sorry!)
If you encounter a site where you cannot see posts, or the dates are off, or you cannot detect the feed, or have any sort of issue, please send the site to us. Nine times out of ten we can fix it.
Thanks! And do let us know what features you’d like to see. We have a few other tricks up our sleeves, but I don’t want to spill the beans just yet. 
Edit:
- added some suggestions from Bill Minton–thank you Bill!
- added a bug to look into a page that renders incorrectly for Tony Hsu–thank you Tony!
1.1 Submitted and Some Kind Words
November 6, 2008 by kidjan · 11 Comments
Good news: 1.1 has been submitted! We’re confident that this release will really build on 1.0 and provide a much better experience. We were blown away by the response 1.0 got, but we feel that 1.1 is going to be a big improvement.
We definitely have had loads of constructive criticism, and we hope to receive far more in the future. That said, everybody loves to be flattered. Here are two short reviews on DaisyFeed. The first, from The Apple Blog:
Daisy Feed incorporates an immense array of features including feed ranking, favorites list, email integration and — this is the killer feature for me — auto-feed recognition. And, just in case you need that extra push to go grab the app right now, it looks gorgeous and is totally free.
The second, from antarjaal:
A free RSS reader. Better looking and performing than the “Free RSS Reader”. The autodiscovery of feeds also worked quite well. It allows for categorizing the feeds and has a separate screen for favorites.
To both, thank you for the kind words, and we hope 1.1 exceeds your expectations.
DaisyFeed 1.1 Approaches!
November 6, 2008 by kidjan · 1 Comment
We are nearing completion of 1.1, which is going to bring about a slew of new features, improvements and bug fixes. The feedback we’ve received has been tremendously helpful, and to everyone who submitted bugs, feature requests and critiques, thank you! Your contributions have been extremely helpful.
A brief list of changes in 1.1:
- The Full Article feature returns! You will now be able to view the full web page in DaisyFeed.
- Online Documentation. We’ve added additional documentation available in the application that details how to perform various operations. We’ll be updating the documentation in the very near future to include more tutorials.
- Reworked page for viewing articles–added buttons to jump to previous and next articles, moved safari and mail links into a separate menu
- “Strike” gesture support for deleting items from a feed! By swiping a given feed item, they can be easily deleted.
- Basic OPML support. By entering an OPML URL into autodetect (e.g. scripting.com/feeds/top100.opml), DaisyFeed will add a whole new category and all of the feeds contained in the OPML file.
- Fix for feeds with relative URLs.
- Fixes for some feeds with funny date/time formats.
- Fix for odd keyboard layouts and using wrong keyboard for a given page.
- Improved Memory Management. This makes DaisyFeed more stable and less prone to crashing.
- More robust feed parsing.
- Numerous other bugs and application crashes have been solved.
Bullet points are all fine and dandy, but everybody loves the eye-candy. Here’s a shot of the new article page (full view returns! previous/next article navigation! hurray!), and the new sub-menu to mail/open in safari:
Here’s a screen shot of the online documentation:
Here’s initial OPML support:
For OPML, we’d love feedback on how you use OPML files in various reader applications so we can figure out how to best implement this new feature. We realize our method for importing may not be ideal, so suggestions and advice are welcome. We look forward to hearing any and all comments about DaisyFeed. Let us know what you think!
How To Use Categories
October 24, 2008 by kidjan · 1 Comment
DaisyFeed allows you to easily add new categories, and assign feeds to them. To create a new category, press the “Categories” button on the bottom of home page. From there, you should see a page like so:
“News” is a category that exists by default, and “AutoDiscovery” is a category that is added when you discover new feeds through the AutoDiscovery feature. To create a new category, click the “Edit” button in the upper right corner of the screen. The page should now look like so:
From here, clicking on the green plus symbol will let you add an entirely new category. The red minus symbol will let you delete a whole category (this will also delete all feeds inside!). Clicking on a feed itself will allow you to edit an existing feed. Click on the green plus symbol and add a new category. I added a “Computer Hardware” category:
Once you’ve added all of the information, click the “Save” button in the upper right corner.
Now let’s say I want to move my Silent PC Review feed (which is in my AutoDiscover category) to this new Computer Hardware category. Click on the AutoDiscover category and select the edit button in the upper right corner:
Click on the Silent PC Review feed, which will take you to the edit page for that feed. From there, you can easily change the category with the wheel feature at the bottom of the edit page:
Also, note that on the edit page, you can easily add this feed to your favorites list by sliding the “OFF” toggle switch to “ON”. That feed will be added to your favorites page!
How To Use AutoDiscovery
October 24, 2008 by kidjan · 4 Comments
DaisyFeed includes a sweet AutoDiscovery feature that will check a page for RSS and Atom feeds. From the DaisyFeed start page, click on AutoDiscovery in the lower right corner. You should see a page like so:
From here, enter the URL into the address bar, and click “Go.” Let’s say we want to add Silent PC Review:
DaisyFeed should detect a feed on the page:
Click OK, and DaisyFeed will add the feed. From there, it will be added to the AutoDiscovery category.
We Make Life Easy
October 21, 2008 by kidjan · Leave a Comment
Somewhere in an Internet forum, far, far away…unwired posed a question:
DaisyFeed has an “autodiscovery” mode where you enter the website where you want to get RSS feeds from. It says “no RSS feeds detected” but the website has a heading saying “Our RSS feeds” with the RSS feed icons next to each category. (DaisyFeed doesn’t) give a clue as to what format they want the information in e.g.
http://xxxx.com/feeds/ or whatever or do you just put in the www.xxx.com format?
To put it bluntly, the DaisyFeed team consists of some of the laziest individuals known to man. Because of this, the idea of having to manually locate and enter a URL like”http://feedproxy.google.com/TechCrunch” simply doesn’t work for us.
We make life easy. Just enter the URL of the homepage (e.g. for Silent PC Review, enter “silentpcreview.com”. For Tech Crunch, enter “techcrunch.com”, etc.), and DaisyFeed will parse and locate any feeds (be they Atom or RSS) and present you with the results.
We’re also looking at totally new ways to add and manage feeds that we’re really excited about. But I don’t want to spill the beans just yet. 
News, news, news
October 17, 2008 by kidjan · 1 Comment
First, the good news: DaisyFeed has been accepted to the iPhone store and is available! And FREE! And we’d love to have everyone download it and let us know what they think. We already have more downloads than we expected, some emails and a few other assorted comments. By no means is DaisyFeed done (to the contrary: we are just getting warmed up), and we plan on improving this application in the future. Your feedback is always welcome.
Now, the bad news: due to some nerdy programmatic issues (I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty), we had to zap the detail view (you can still view it in Safari) from the application until we can work out some kinks. So the feed page looks something like so:
So you can still view the full page, but not inside DaisyFeed. We fully expect this to be resolved in a future release.
Anyways, download it and tell us what you think!