Back in the App Store

by Ben Ubois

The Feedbin for iPhone and iPad app is once again available in the App Store.

Previously, it was ineligible to receive updates until support for Apple’s in-app purchase system was added.

If you’re running the TestFlight version, now is a good time to switch over to the App Store version since it is the most recent release.

Here’s what’s new:

  • In-app subscription support for new accounts
  • An improved settings screen with access to your newsletter address
  • The new app icon (finally)
  • a number of bug fixes that make for a much better experience

YouTube Embeds

by Ben Ubois

Feedbin is great for following YouTube channels and playlists.

There’s no algorithm or confusion about what you have already watched, just the videos from your favorite creators in chronological order.

To make the experience even better, YouTube embeds have recently been improved.

There’s now rich metadata including the channel name and video length. Profile images are used both at the feed level (instead of the generic YouTube favicon) and in the embed to reinforce the creator.

You can easily subscribe to any YouTube channel, user or playlist by copying and pasting the YouTube URL into Feedbin.

New Logo

by Ben Ubois

Todd and I had the pleasure of working with Dan Cederholm on a new logo for Feedbin.

I’ve been a long time fan of Dan’s design and writing, so when I came across this pitch perfect one-pager for his spiffy Super Turbo Logo Service™ I jumped at the chance.

The process was fun, collaborative, and remarkably smooth. I’m thrilled with the result!

Newsletter News: Full Formatting and Sender Management

by Ben Ubois

You can now view newsletters with the original formatting. Previously, Feedbin was only able to offer the newsletter content with all styles removed to prevent conflicts between Feedbin’s styles and the newsletter’s styles.

Next up, there are some new management options available in Settings.

When you unsubscribe from a newsletter, future deliveries are blocked to guarantee you don’t see emails that are no longer wanted. However, this creates an issue: what if you want to resubscribe?

To help with this, Feedbin maintains a record of all previous newsletter senders. Deactivated senders are newsletters that you are no longer subscribed to. If you’re trying to resubscribe to a newsletter, you can reactivate that sender.

Automatic Dark Mode and More

by Ben Ubois

There’s a new palette to change the theme and other formatting preferences.

The new Auto option will change the theme based on your system preference.

This also comes with a change in behavior: all formatting options are now per-device. This way you can have a light theme on your day phone and a dark theme on your night phone ;) Or use a different font size depending on if you are on a desktop computer or a mobile one.

Moving to Colocation

by Ben Ubois

Feedbin's rack at Hurricane Electric Fremont 2

This Sunday, September 29, Feedbin will be moving to a new hosting environment. The move will mean some downtime. If all goes well, it should be about 30 minutes.

This project has been in the works since April. It’s been a lot of fun and very educational to work on. There will be more posts about the servers and setup soon.

NetNewsWire 5

by Ben Ubois

NetNewsWire 5 has been released. I’m thrilled that it:

NetNewsWire was my first introduction to RSS. I’d seen links to RSS feeds around on various blogs, but it took NetNewsWire to put a great interface on the technology and unlock its power. Without NetNewsWire, there would be no Feedbin. It’s a dream come true to be a part of it.

Congratulations and thanks to Brent Simmons, Maurice Parker (who implemented Feedbin sync), and the rest of the NetNewsWire team.

Save Webpages to Read Later

by Ben Ubois

Feedbin now has a read later feature. This enables you to send articles and webpages from anywhere and have them appear alongside your feeds, email newsletters and Twitter subscriptions. It’s called Pages.

There are two ways to get started:

  1. The Feedbin app. If you downloaded the app, then surprise, there’s already an action extension on your device for sending content to Feedbin. It can be enabled in the share menu by scrolling to the end of the bottom row of icons and tapping More. It’s called Send to Feedbin.
  2. For all other devices/browsers there’s a bookmarklet available in settings. Drag it to your bookmarks toolbar. Then click it whenever you’re on a page you want to send to Feedbin.

Pages works like a regular feed, so anything that gets sent to it will sync to any client you use with Feedbin.

Finally, Pages helps preserve the content you send to it. Whenever possible, Feedbin will download any images it can find in the content. That way if the images are ever moved or removed, Feedbin can automatically serve the archived images.

Feedbin for iOS

by Ben Ubois

The official Feedbin app for iPhone and iPad is now available.

This is a hybrid app, which enables it to achieve full feature-parity with the website. The app allows for better integration and performance than using Feedbin on the web.

The app also lays the groundwork for a great new feature that is coming soon.

Three Columns

by Ben Ubois

There’s an update out today that changes and improves a few things about how Feedbin works. There’s a visual refresh as well. The idea is three unbounded columns that appear to scroll indefinitely.

  1. Universal edit button. Each source now has a consistent editing interface. You can use edit for renaming, tagging, unsubscribing and deleting. Just about everything you can do to a source can now be accomplished using the edit button. The new edit interface makes everything easily accessible on mobile as well.

  2. Grouped sections. The new section headers for Searches, Tags and Feeds help differentiate the types of sources. This helps to reduce clutter as the number of sources in Feedbin increases.

  3. View mode. The control to switch between Unread, Starred, and All view modes is now a dropdown list. This change makes it very clear what you are viewing at all times.

    There’s an improvement in behavior here as well. When switching between modes, your currently selected feed will be updated to reflect the chosen mode. For example if you’re viewing a tag called Favorites under Unread and you switch to Starred, the middle column will immediately update to show just the starred articles under Favorites.

Newer
Older