NewsBlur’s behavior on Android changed some months ago (6 months? 9 months? 1 year?) and I’ve been hoping the problem would be corrected. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.
Whenever I return to ‘All Stories’ from reading a story on my Android phone, I’m back at the beginning of ‘All Stories’ and I have to scroll down to the story I just read. Needless to say, this is annoying, particularly since it’s new (for some definition of ‘new’) behavior, and it gets progressively worse the more I run through the ‘All Stories’ list.
I’ve tried to compensate by selecting "Mark older stories read’, but this doesn’t work perfectly. Although I have my read filter set to show only unread stories, after marking older stories as read, ‘All Stories’ still shows some unread stories. What I expected to happen is for all stories older than the one currently selected one to be marked as read and for ‘All Stories’ to display only unread stories.
Perhaps there is a setting I’m not aware of that prevents restarting at the top of the current list of ‘All Stories’ …? Or is there some technique that I can use to avoid having to scroll down from the beginning after I’ve read a story … ?
> Whenever I return to ‘All Stories’ from reading a story on my Android phone, I’m back at the beginning of ‘All Stories’ and I have to scroll down to the story I just read.
What is your exact workflow? I can, from the feed list, tap into All Stories, scroll down, tap a story, read that story, even open it in the external browser, and hit Back until reaching the story list and the list is still scrolled down. This is with about 500 stories in the list.
If you have many, many more stories or your device is low on memory, the system can toss out your view, but that is largely out of our control. Does it still happen if you have significantly fewer stories in the list?
> Although I have my read filter set to show only unread stories, after marking older stories as read, ‘All Stories’ still shows some unread stories.
This is working as designed and matches the way that newsblur.com works. Stories aren’t immediately dropped from the list upon reading when viewing in Unread Only. Just tested with the website and confirmed this is the case for both individual feeds and All Stories.
My workflow is exactly the same as yours except for the last item: my list is not scrolled down. I restart at the beginning. I usually have less than 100 stories in All Stories; average around 50.
The only reason I’m interested in this use case is as a workaround to having to scroll down to the current story in All Stories when returning from reading that story.
Daniel, couldn’t we just store a pointer to the last active story and just scroll to that on every load of the story list, clearing that pointer when returning to the feed list?
Yeah, in theory we could work around the fact that the system is throwing out the list position on the device. This will be tricky, though, since the typical place to store such information is . . . in the same place where list position is already being stored and discarded. We would need to brute-force store it in the DB/on disk.
I would rather go after the underlying problem - find out why the device thinks the list is using so much memory that it needs to be thrown out when offscreen and reduce said memory usage.