Got A Question?
Feb 12th, 2008 by Tariq Bamadhaj
This is going to be quick. Today will be the last day you can ask any of the developers in our Developer Series a question. Feel free to ask them anything from improvements you would like to see in a software or even suggestions for a new software. To leave your questions, just leave a comment below. Even if you do not have any questions, you can also show your appreciations by leaving your comments below.
For those who are new, I currently got together 5 representatives from WebIs, SBSH, DinarSoft, IliumSoft and Spb and asked them some questions. These questions can be found in the Developer Series which is made of 4 parts. The first 2 parts (I and II) are now online and you can read. Parts III and IV will be published on this and next Saturday respectively.
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I believe I’ve asked my questions and expressed my appreciations already, but this morning I thought of something and this is the best new post where I can post about it.
Could you consider an RSS feed for the Comments, if that’s technically possible?
The last while (since I started reading your site) there are quite some interesting comments, and subscribing to an RSS feed for comments would be a nice alternative to subscribing to all the posts for e-mail notifications.
There used to be an RSS feed for Comments in the past but the uptake was non-existent so I removed it to use the real estate space better. Anyway, if you are interested, here is the feed link.
Thank you! I found out PJMDS also asked about this in the comments some days ago, so now you’ve got at least some subscribers.
Oh yeah he did ask in the forums so I managed to copy it over and pass it to you.
I’m subscribed to it and it’s great to be notified of new comments.
That’s nice to hear. Actually the main feed has been optomized with FeedBurner such that it will also show you the comment count of the post. Though not as updated as the feed comments, just thought I let you know in case you have too many feeds to monitor.
I’ve also enabled this for my blog but I find that I never check back on older feeds in my RSS reader. I only check the new items and click them if they’re interesting. But it’s still cool that Wordpress added the comment tag to the main post feed though!
One question to all the developers is whether they would consider going outside of what they normally develop for software or do they tend to want to stick with what they’ve been doing? For instance, with SBSH, they tend to focus a lot on the PIM and phone related apps. Would they consider expanding to other areas like web and media?
Another question is how the developers will determine when a beta program is ready for public distribution? As most of us are aware, even “stable” releases will still have bugs that have yet to be discovered. How do the developers determine when a beta comes out of beta status for the real world?
Just wanted to clarify that when I was asking about expanding into other areas like web and media, I was just bringing it up as an example. Seems like finally with Skyfire, NetFront and even Iris (although some say it’s slow) they are finally creating a browser that is closer to what we get on a desktop.
Again, excuse me for saying what I’ve already mentioned but it’s so important to me and I think that it can be extremely handy and helpful, is to develop a QWERTY button launcher app that will launch or bring up a contact with the press and hold of a QWERTY button (eg. C will bring up the Contacts app, P will bring up the camera app, etc). I am desperate for such an app to be developed.
One more suggestion. With respect to the Pocket Breeze application or any Today plugin app that will show the appointments, etc, would it be possible to show or be given the ability to show the month view complete with icons (I’m pushing it I know) instead of the next days’ appointments, etc? Right now, I know that I can get the month view by tapping at the top but when I get the month view pop up, it doesn’t show the icons. I’m having a hard time finding good looking icons for the PIM apps, regardless of the vendor. If someone is able to provide me with a month view with decent looking icons, I will stick with that PIM app. I have yet to find it. Pocket Informant is nice but again, the icons are ugly and jagged. Thanks!
Not to worry, I will be looking back at comments made in Parts I & II of the Series and be forwarding them to the developers tomorrow.
Maceyr, you can of course just install the trial versions of Pocket Informant, PocketBreeze and Agenda Fusion, then copy the icon store, and then uninstall the software again! This way you have the icon stores of all the programs, and you can use whichever you want, in any piece of software you want! So that shouldn’t have to determine your choice of software, you can just use software A because of usability, and use the icons from software B.
Also, assuming that you’re talking about the “pinned” monthly calendar inside PocketBreeze that you can enable in the Options, Amit is aware of the differences between the popup and pinned monthly calenders and does plan to improve them so that you’ve got the best of both. I’m not sure when and how that will be done, but there certainly has been discussion about this in the SBSH forums!
Thanks for letting me know! Yes, the pop up looks so bland and I really want a month view with icons, okay, nice looking icons. It’s strange how nice the icons are in the Pocket Breeze today screen and then I go into Pocket Informant and I’m seeing something completely different.
So they do look good on the Today screen? Well that’s quite weird, then it´s probably not the transparency, or it´s something really weird with transparency. You might want to hop over to the SBSH forums and ask your question there. Just include screenshots where the icon is visible in PB and in PI and people can take a look. (of course feel free to make all the personal appointments etc. blurry!)
I have some problems with NewsBreak so I want to ask IlimSoft developers about:
1) Why no EXIT button on the program ? even I can make a program in C++ or C# with one button to close it
2) Why the left soft button has many functions like Cancel,Refresh, Channels, that’s very bad because sometimes I’m downloading feeds and reading feeds at the same time, I press the button to have the Channels and the program cancels the download because the button function changed.
3) I’m also not happy with the performance of the program, sometime it seems to stuck for a few seconds while exiting a channel to the list of channels, that’s very annoying.
Now my suggestion to improve the program, there’s no way to find dead feeds, let’s think about some statistical menu that let the user know all about the channels, example:
feed name | last refresh | Nr of errors | error last refresh |
feed1 | date and hour | Number | Yes or No |
Or maybe warn the user about the channels without successful updates for the last 5 times ?
My views…
1) I see your point! I personally don’t want to close Newsbreak. I have set Newsbreak and my Messaging application to stay running in the background while ilauncher closes the other applications (iLauncher calls this “task manager exceptions”). However, an “Exit” item in the right softkey menu wouldn’t hurt for the situations people don’t need Newsbreak anymore.
2) I understand Refresh/Cancel, they see to the same action: updating. Then as soon as you go deeper than the main feed list, the button changes to navigation. I like this, because it gives me full one-hand navigation! Just hold my device in my hand, start the updating, and then use the softkey and navigation keys to read all my feeds. I just wish the “Mark all feeds read” items would be accessible with less buttonpresses. In my opinion, the menu could look like:
New
—
Mark channel read
Mark channel unread
Mark all channels read
Mark all channels unread
—
Channel submenu
View submenu
Options submenu, inclusing the Export and Categories items.
—
About
My reason for saying this is that the Export and Categories items are probably used less frequently than the Mark channels read items.
Inside the channel, the right softkey menu is small enough to put all the “mark as read” items in the menu without having the need to re-organize.
3) Yes! Very annoying. It’s not like the device hangs for 30 seconds or longer, but it does hang for a while. During that time, the scrollbar is displayed both where it is in the headline view (at the total top, just below the topright OK button), AND where it is in the Channel view (below the channel name and logo.
This is the only bug I’ve been able to see in Newsbreak, and because it’s such a usable program, this is like the smartest kid in class who does very well, but sometimes just doesn’t pay attention. It’s still the smartest kid in class but for an unneccesary reason just not genius.
Finally, I really agree your last suggestion. Please inform us about feeds that had unsuccesfull updates for a number of times, so that we can then manually investigate (outside Newsbreak) if the feed is still active or can be removed. Great idea!
Hi. Some of you may know me. I’m the Product Manager here at Ilium Software. Most of the questions will be answered in a future post here but I’d like to address the specific technical questions.
“1) Why no EXIT button on the program ?”
Easy. Microsoft told us not to have one. In order to get logo certification you need to meet certain requirements. From the beginning not having an exit button was one of them (why exit when Windows Mobile can manage memory for you!) Logo certification is very important (not something I’ll go into here, but it is) so we followed the rules.
BUT in the most recent set of requirements they have dropped this so as we move along you will likely see the ability to exit the program added in a future release.
“2) Why the left soft button has many functions like Cancel,Refresh, Channels, ”
Again, per Microsoft, the left button should have the most used function for that particular screen AND/OR the appropriate navigation option. I see your point though and I’ll certainly take it into consideration.
“3) I’m also not happy with the performance of the program”
I don’t have a quick solution to this, since generally performance isn’t an issue, but drop Kevin a line. His email is kevin @ iliumsoft . com and he may be able to offer some ideas for improving performance.
And thanks for the suggestions. We’ll definitely keep these in mind!
Hi Marc and welcome to the site. Thanks for personally coming down and replying to these questions. We appreciate it.
Hey spmwinkel thanks for sharing your thoughts about newsbreak and my suggestions
I forgot one strange bug, this bug appears sometimes, probably corrupted data from softreset, in the channels menu I have:
feed name 6/25
but inside the channel I have more than 6 unread topics
Also some old bug, maybe related was that clicking on a feed would take me to other unrelated feed lol , this bug is probably fixed.
I had one cool idea to identify feeds with problems, just change the color of their name to red when newsbreak is unable to contact the feed link.
I can’t say I’m familiar with your bug, but of course it might happen without me knowing it. I ususally enter a channel, view the headlines, and then use the left/right hardware buttons to change channels. So normally I don’t look at the amount of unread items closely.
As for the corrupted feeds with a red color, I agree that would probably be the most useful way to do this. But then: should people have a way of turning the color off (back to normal) if they want the feed to remain in the list? Could be useful, but could also be confusing for people who accidentaly remove the red color and then don’t have any notifications about the corrupt feed… Perhaps it should stay red then?
The red color stays on the name of the feed while there’s the message inside the feed:
Error occurred on last update Tap
for details
The same method used to remove the error message inside the feed can be used to change the feed name to the normal color.
Sometimes the most logical solutions just are the best!
Now let’s just hope the Ilium team reads this
Yep, we’re reading.
Other thing about newsbreak , maybe spmwinkel add similar experience, I suspect that the program sometimes kills my Wifi connection, after using newsbreak sometimes I have to enable and disable wifi of just wait in order to have internet access, any thoughts about this problem ?
I did have issues with WiFi - when starting an application and starting WiFi, I often saw that only a small bit (of the website, or just one feed) would update, and then nothing… Untill I canceled and tries again.
However a few days back I just waited 3 seconds after my WiFi fully connected, and then started the update or started navigating to a website, and so far things have been smooth.
Not sure if it could be the same but this is as close as my experiences get.
Not really my problem but thanks anyway.
Another suggestion to improve newsbreak, make one extra option to download images when receiving feeds, sometimes I have the feeds but not their images so I have to be online when reading the feed to watch the image.
I just sent an e-mail to a contact at Ilium, so that they’re aware of all the fine ideas here. This post was meant for questions for the interview, so it’s quite possible that the Ilium team would miss these feature suggestions if nobody notifies them about it. So hopefully they will now find it and these ideas can be taken into account while developing a new update!
I guess NewsBreak is like an RSS reader? Have you tried Spb Insight? How does it compare?
I use Newsbreak several times a day, and along with Resco Explorer it’s my most frequently used application (well iLauncher is, but that’s less visible).
One difference, I believe, is that SPB Insight doesn’t support podcasts, and Newsbreak does. I assume that they both update regular feeds properly but when I gave Insight a try several weeks/months ago, I was so grown to Newsbreak that it wasn’t fair competition really.
spmwinkel I have the same thoughts about newsbreak
We are definitely reading these. Really, if you EVER have problems PLEASE contact us. We work very very hard to help resolve customer issues and customer comments that people send us are one of the big deciding factors in what new features go into a product. If you send the type of stuff you are posting here, it won’t get shuffled off into a pile. We’ll definitely look at it, help wherever we can, and add ideas to our “future features” lists.
Thanks for dropping by!
Not to worry. I have already told them about it but sending them an email is a great idea too as they might miss it.
Marc thanks for listen to us, it’s very nice to have you here
best regards