Font Scaling Support
Font scaling support on mobile devices has been added. If you use iOS'/iPadOS' system wide font scaling (“Dynamic Type”) or Android’s equivalent, FeedCity will now honour these settings and scale its pages accordingly.
(On iOS, this raises the default font size from 16px to 17px, which I currently do not “correct”. So type is slightly larger by default. Currently, I have kept it like this. I don’t know, if it’ll stay larger.)
New feeds overview pages
The overview pages of the “Subscriptions” and “Feeds” pages for each timeline got an overhaul: they are a little cleaner, show the date a feed was last updated, and you can now sort them by “Last updated” (the default), “Subscribed” and “Title”.
Podcast episode images in RSS feeds
As you know, FeedCity gives you (private) RSS and Atom feeds for every timeline. Now, podcast posts include their episode’s image in each post.
That means, if you use one of your “Audio” RSS feeds in your podcast app of choice, you will now see each episode’s image instead of none or just FeedCity’s logo.
New "Text" Filter
You can now filter every timeline for “Text” content.
This is in addition to the filtering for “Audio” and “Video” posts. It (currently) does not necessarily mean “text only” - it means “something to read or look at, something that has no playable media”.
Of course, all those “Text” timelines got their own RSS and Atom feeds, so you can integrate them wherever you like. Maybe, you’d like to read your bookmarks on your e-reader? Now you can (if your e-reader supports feeds)!
As a bonus, all posts are now marked with the type - “Text”, “Audio” or “Video” - they are categorised as. You’ll see the icon next to the date of each post.
Podcast progress is now synced
If you listen to podcasts, the episode progress is now synced across your devices. Which means that you can now continue listening on any device and have it pick up where you last paused - no matter the computer you’re using.
The remaining time will now also be shown in the top right corner of each player.
(Previously, progress was only stored separately per device.)
I deployed a few fixes and improvements around caching - especially in regards to the “bookmark”, “like”, and “share” buttons. Those were not always showing the accurate states. Now they should.
Collapsible posts, improved feed avatars and more
In the last couple of weeks, I fixed some problems and improved a few things:
- A post you can expand can now also be collapsed again. You’ll see a little arrow/triangle/chevron on the top left side, which also functions as the collapse button.
- More feeds have avatars now. Some feeds don’t include them directly, so I started fetching website icons in these cases.
- Bookmarked and liked posts now have a little “disappear”-animation when you remove them via their respective overview pages.
- List-management buttons are now properly aligned again.
- Relative image/audio file/video file URLs are correctly resolved now in more places.
New little feature: a multi-image gallery now features a little image count indicator.
Such a horizontally scrolling gallery is rendered, when an entry includes multiple images as enclosures, or they are added via the Media RSS extension. Example feed: Kenneth Wajda
Shares
You can now share posts on FeedCity. Other citizens can follow you right in the app, others anywhere via RSS.
Updates: navigation placement changed again and a starry night sky.
I’ve been mainly working on behind the scenes improvements and streamlining the onboarding for new citizens in the last weeks.
But I’m back to making more day-to-day visible stuff. First up: the navigation on larger screens is back on the side again. I believe it’s a better placement, and I think it works with the current, slightly updated design.
There also have been some adjustments to the background: the clouds now stay fixed, even on iOS and iPadOS. And browser is now getting a starry night sky - where previously, this was only available in Safari (as this is the only browser supporting the new random() CSS function at the moment).
More updates soon.
/Daniel
UI Update: on large(r) screens, the navigation bar is now horizontal across the top. And the clouds are back.
New logo icon
FeedCity now has an updated logo icon. Here is the previous and the new icon side by side (the old one left/first):
It’s for sure an incremental update, but the larger RSS icon makes it a little more recognisable in small sizes. Plus, it looks a little more polished.
The site and its manifest.json file now also include a maskable version without the surrounding circle. This way, operating systems can crop or mask it as they see fit when installing FeedCity as an app (PWA), making the icon look more native to the platform. (If you had FeedCity already installed as an app, you need to reinstall it to make the new icon show.)
/Daniel
I also fixed a couple of bugs today:
- When multiple entries of a feed were fetched at once, those would show in the wrong order. Fixed
- Sometimes a feed would not immediately update, despite receiving a WebSub request. Fixed
The design of the UI has been updated throughout the site. The changes are more on the subtle side of things, but making everything look and feel more refined and consistent.
Bookmark anything
You can now bookmark any web page in FeedCity. Use the bookmarklet or iOS Shortcut to save an article, a podcast, or a video for later reading, listening or watching.
Fixed an issue with links in post: if they are relative URLs, they no get converted to absolute ones, so you can actually navigate to them.
Underutilised Feed Data
A feed file can contain quite a bit of useful information. And I think this is underutilised by a lot of existing feed readers.