Android: Mark as read while reading

A nice feature on the Android app would be to mark items as read as you scroll through the feed. Similar to what happens on the web.

Another option would be to borrow from Google Reader and have a long press on a feed item with the option to mark previous items as read.

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Right now the app bundles up read stories are submits them when you move back up to the story titles page. Not ideal, but it saves on battery life.

How about the long press option? It could bundle up the read stories and submit them in the same way as moving back to the story titles page.

Why doesn’t the current method work well for you? Are you not in the story titles list that often? I agree, it should happen sporadically, even if you don’t hit the story titles list.

I think this could be related to the general sync issues I get on android. I often hop into reading a full feed, am swiping thru stories, and then switch to a different app and forget about what I was doing, never going back to the story list for hours/days/reboots. Would just context switching out still update the backend or would it be missed?

Yeah, context switching won’t trigger the update. I’ll add that to my feature wish list.

Manderson - mark previous as read is a tricky option, since I didn’t realize that’s what it is used for. I think I’ve seen that option before, but it seemed like clutter. On the iPhone app, I actually have that option when you hit mark all as read in a folder. But not on a per-feed basis. If more people ask for this, I’ll think about it.

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Ah, I think this (dropping read-status on context switch) solves about 75% of my mystery for “sync issues”. Glad we got to the bottom of it!

I’m still getting used to newsblur both as a desktop and mobile replacement for Google Reader. “Mark Previous as Read” is something I used all the time on the Reader android app. Its no uncommon for me to spend 5 minutes scrolling through a list of 100-200 subjects looking for an interesting article. Being able to mark a place in the list and clear anything older than that point in time makes the process more efficient for me.

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On the “mark previous as read” issue, the workflow describe by csdibiase and manderson23 is exactly my workflow on Google Reader. (Yeah, I’m one of those people who’s only here because I’m scrambling for a replacement - why did iGoogle get a year and a half notice and GReader only a few months??).

Anyway, you said if more people asked for it, you’d look into it, so I figured I’d throw my $0.02 in.

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Yes the Android version is a deal breaker at the moment. It misses so much functionality that it makes the whole thing basically pointless. The web version of NewsBlur is really nice but it’s worth nothing if you don’t have a good mobile version available - at least for Android and iOS… and the Android version is particularly lacking at the moment. It absolutely deserves the bad ratings on Google Play store.
It’s a pitty but I think I have to continue my search for alternative Google Reader replacements as I don’t see this one-man-show is going to catch up on all the issues present in the next two months or so. But please proof me wrong :wink:

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Have to agree, the android app is utterly useless without this feature. Why can’t it mark the ones I’ve scrolled past as read as it does on the Web?

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Good news. Mark previous as read will be in the next release of the Android app.

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I just get a blank screen when loading the mobile site. Debugging it from a PC I see a 404 for the following assets, which can’t be correct:

https://www.newsblur.com/Users/sclay/…

But either way the screen never loads anything.

I’m coming from Google Reader as well but I always used their very competent mobile site. Since I’m often clicking links from articles, it makes sense for me to do everything in the browser. The things that the app missing (or I just can’t find them?) that are pretty big for me are:

  1. Sort by oldest!!

  2. Mark as unread

  3. Being able to zoom/scale images

I definitely want this feature too!

You are great! Now I am 100 % sure NewsBlur _is_ my Google Reader replacement!

By the way, mark previous as read would be very useful even in the web interface. In fact, I used to use Greasemonkey script to add this feature to the Google Reader web interface.

Many thanks for the feature! However, I just realized the long press menu works only if reading articles form one channel. If I am reading content of a folder aggregating many channels, the long press menu is not available which is really pity. Would be possible to add this feature also for the folder listing?

I guess I am used to a certain workflow coming from Google Reader. What I want to do is the following:

  1. Browse through the stories of a feed but only reading a few/none.
  2. I decide to stop reading that feed for whatever reason but want to mark as read up until the point I have reached.
  3. In Google Reader on Android I would long press on the item I had reached and select “Mark previous as read”.

I Newsblur the only options for marking a story as read seem to be reading the story or marking the complete feed as read.

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Seriously, the android app is painful. I can’t tell what will save my read counts and what wont. I read on muni a lot and when I’m underground I have no idea if it will save later or not. (Plus the read counts on the android app seem to be completely random and keep going back to what they were before, even after I quit a feed.)

The android app is practically unusable as is, which is a real shame because I really like being able to catch up on my news when waiting for the bus/etc.

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