Could you explain how the offline support in the beta iOS app is meant to work please?
I open the app and pull down to ensure a fresh fetch. It says “On it’s way” “Syncing stories” then “All done”. I can see I have various feeds with stories waiting to be read in them.
I enable airplane mode to ensure I’m now offline.
At this point my assumption was that I’d be able to click on any of those feeds and read the items as they’ll all have been cached to my phone. In fact, when I click on a feed there’s there. It says “Offline” at the bottom, which immediately changes to say “Fetching recent stories…” and then just sits there spinning forever.
This feels like offline mode isn’t working for me?
If I view a specific feed before going offline I can read an entry in that feed, but when I try to “save this story” it says “The server barfed”.
I do hope I’ll be able to save stories, and that all my saved stories will be permanently available when offline.
I have:
Download stories: On
Download images: On
Download using: wifi+cellular
Store: 10,000 stories
Ah. If I set “Story order” to “newest first” it starts working a bit better. The refresh now takes a bit longer because it’s downloading stories, and when I click on a feed I can view items in it.
I assume story order shouldn’t make a difference.
Sadly, “save this story” still fails and viewing my saved stories is empty.
Saved stories says “Offline” which immediately changes to “Fetching recent stories”.
With the official Newsblur 3.0 for iOS I get a very similar problem.
No matter the ‘story order’, in offline mode, I always get the endless spinning “Fetching recent stories…”, even if Newsblur suposedly cached everything 2 minutes before while on wifi.
In other words, offline reading doesn’t work for me at the moment. (that said v3.0 is a great improvement, thanks! :-))
I’m getting the same problem with the official 3.0 App. If you set the story order to Newest First it works fine, but any other setting and offline access doesn’t work.
Yes, on the official 3.0 app it still seems to me to be as described above:
(1) Setting preferences -> story order to Oldest First breaks offline mode.
(2) Save this story or Mark as unread don’t work when offline.
(3) Saved Stories are not available when offline.
It’s easy enough to work-around (1), so I’m not too concerned that one right now myself.
(2) is a problem though because it means that once you’ve opened a story offline (ie. it’s marked as read) you then necessarily have to fully read it straight away as there’s no easy way to postpone it. Knowing this means that I tend to avoid using offline support as much as I might.
(3) is a feature I really hope will get added so that when I’m on an underground train I can work through my backlog of things I’ve saved.
So, a few little fixes please, but generally keep up the good work.
I agree with Chris - his point #2 (mark as unread not working when offline) makes the offline cache difficult to use. Many of my sites don’t post full text in the body of the feed item, so if I see them offline and want to read later, there’s no way to do that. For now, this means I can’t really use the offline feature at all.
Looking forward to the next update, keep up the good work! I love NewsBlur.