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Android app update: premium subscriptions, saved searches, in-app browser, auto-dark mode

For a point release this one sure is big. The Android app has been upgraded to include a bunch of features found on the web.

For one, premium subscriptions can now be purchased in the Android app itself. Reading by folder, saved story tags, searching and saved searches are all premium features that you can unlock directly in the app.

Also, saved searches are now at the bottom of your feed list. Take a look:

Heres' the full list of version 10.1's many new features:

Premium subscriptions are now available on Android! Read by folder, saved story tags, searching, and more is exclusive to premium subscribers.

Saved searches

In-app browser, so you don't need to leave NewsBlur

Auto-theme option for dark mode so it can turn on automatically at night

You can now delete and rename folders and add a folder while adding a feed

Fixed issues around the intelligence trainer, HTML in comments, some images not loading

If you would like to request a new feature on Android, please submit an idea on the NewsBlur Forum. We're prioritizing the next big release and would love to hear your input.

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Customizable grid view story layout

The grid view has quickly become one of my go-to story title views. It provides generous, clickable boxes with enlarged images and plenty of preview text. But until now, they were limited to a preset height.

Starting today, you can now change the height of stories in the grid view. You have five options to choose from: XS, Small, Medium, Large, and XL.

Here are a few examples of how you can customize the grid view.

With the single column layout:

With the 2 column layout:

With the 3 column layout:

With the 4 column layout:

Don't forget you can also adjust the font size and even turn off image previews.

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Highlight passages and add private notes to saved stories

When you're reading a story and want to save a portion of it for personal use, you now have a couple new options. Highlighting is now available for all stories. Simply select the text you want to highlight and NewsBlur helpfully shows a tooltip that allows you to select a part of the text and save it.

You can enrich your reading experience with highlights and come back to passages you want to remember. All stories with highlights are tagged as "Highlights" in your Saved Story tags list. That way you can immediately come back to your highlights.

Second, you can now also write private notes to yourself. If you're doing research and want to remember why a particular story is being saved, the private notes text box can save your thoughts without having to share them with the world.

A few other small changes have been added to this feature. You can also save stories and tag them from any website using the bookmarklet (which you can install under Manage > Goodies > Bookmarklet).

Lots to live in this release! Keep posting good ideas to the forum.

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Turn the lights down, dark mode has come to NewsBlur

We've had dark mode on iOS and Android for years but I'm now pleased to announce a worthy dark theme has come to the NewsBlur web app.

The origins for this theme came from the community. Originally started by Kemwer in 2013, it has been maintained and updated by Splike since 2014. In fact, you can still use Splike's theme as an alternate dark mode.

That's 7 years of NewsBlur having an unofficial dark mode, but users had to jump through hoops to use it: installing a browser extension (which had a malware scare in 2018) or having to copy the Stylish CSS to NewsBlur's Account settings where it would need to be manually updated. What NewsBlur needed was having it built in.

Today NewsBlur is shipping first-class support. Building a dark theme requires more than inverting the existing color scheme, turning white to black and green to purple. Quite a bit of thought around UX and information hierarchy went into this dark theme design. I also used this as an opportunity to freshen up icons and small visual details on both light and dark themes.

Now we have a consistent dark theme across all of the first-party apps. The Android app had dark mode first in 2014. Then came the iOS app is 2016. Now we’re firmly in 2020 and it’s made it to the web. Goes to show that NewsBlur is always getting better. 

If you like the new features we’ve been releasing recently, I would greatly appreciate if you could share a tweet or Facebook post about NewsBlur. If you enjoy staying connected with culture and news through NewsBlur and you think your friends and followers would too, let them know about your news reader of choice. I appreciate all the kind comments that have come in since releasing this new theme.

In love 🥰 with the new dark theme of @NewsBlur ! Kudos @samuelclay 👍

— Jean Traullé (@jtraulle) June 24, 2020

Ooooooooooooooo @NewsBlur pic.twitter.com/eG3XSXzuAG

— Billy O'Neal (@MalwareMinigun) June 23, 2020

And please keep the good ideas coming on the forum.

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See the news on your Android dashboard with the new home screen widget

Hot on the heels of the iOS widget release a few months ago, the Android widget is now ready to go!

Check it out:

Ideally both iOS and Android widgets would have been released at the same time. But now that we have a new Android developer, Andrei Dan, we've built the widget and are planning many more new features for Android.

Everything I wrote for the iOS release holds for today's Android widget:

> Most of the time when we release a new feature, it finds immediate use. But every so often a new feature comes along that changes how NewsBlur gets used. I consider offline stories part of this exclusive club. Same with the Text view, which shows you the full text of a story. And push notifications are right up there.

If you're like me and you rely on your phone for your news consumption, having stories handy every time you look at your phone changes your relationship to NewsBlur.

It’s so incredibly useful to have NewsBlur come to me. I hope you feel the same about this Android widget.

If you have any feedback, ideas, or would like changes, please post them on the NewsBlur support forum.

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Catch the news in a glimpse with the new NewsBlur Today View widget on iOS

Most of the time when we release a new feature, it finds immediate use. But every so often a new feature comes along that changes how NewsBlur gets used. I consider offline stories part of this exclusive club. Same with the Text view, which shows you the full text of a story. And push notifications are right up there.

Today, I'm pleased to announce the launch of our new Today View widget on iOS.

Instead of having to open up the app to see what's new, the stories come to you in the Today View, adjacent to the notification center. Personally I find myself checking this Today View widget a dozen times more than I open the NewsBlur app. It's so incredibly useful to have NewsBlur come to me.

Additionally, in version 10.0 of the iOS app, we have a bunch of new features:

A new iOS widget shows the latest stories in your Notification Center and on your iPad dashboard

Statistics visualization for every site

Automatic downloading of the original story full text for offline reading

Unsubscribe from a feed directly from a story

Preferences import & export

And tons of bugs were fixed along with other small improvements:

Fixed crash on start for a few users

Fixed highlighting issue

Fixed settings with stories on bottom

Tweaked dark theme colors to be darker

Fixed wonky behavior on iPad

Clearing offline now clears the cached stories, text, and images from the database

Manually changing the theme now turns off the preference to follow the system appearance

Turning on following the system appearance immediately updates the theme appropriately

Fixed crash on feed load list

Fixed crash on start

And if you're an Android user, I just want you to know that we intended to ship this feature first on Android (and in fact, it is 90% built) but then our Android developer bailed. I'll be hiring for another Android devleoper soon, but if that interests you, please reach out!

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Secure images for everybody

There are two ways to connect to the NewsBlur website. The first is http://www.newsblur.com. The second is https://www.newsblur.com. The first is plain text and the second is encrypted. You get to choose which one you want to use.

Part of the draw of using an encrypted https connection instead of a plain text http connection is that you can protect your privacy. As far as I can tell, there are two reasons for preferring https over http.

One is that using an encrypted https connection to NewsBlur protects what you read from hackers or a man-in-the-middle changing your data as it comes to you. This could be your internet service provider (ISP) inserting ads or it could be snooping wifi router that you are connected to that injects malware into your content. Some companies have been known to do this and https protects you.

But the second reason is that your privacy is also protected from more benign, aggregate collections by ISPs and middlemen that sees what you read and sells that data. NewsBlur doesn't sell any of your data and beginning this week NewsBlur can ensure that nobody other than you and the site you read can either.

The feature that is launching this week (it actually launched Monday in order for me to ensure that it works well) is a secure image proxy for all images served on NewsBlur. That means that NewsBlur will take any images that isn't behind an encrypted https connection and proxies it behind NewsBlur's own secure, encrypted connection.

You should notice next to no difference. The only difference you may notice is that some images may load faster, since NewsBlur has a thicker pipe to the Internet and can download data faster than your client browser can, which means that your persistent connection to NewsBlur's servers takes over instead of having to make new connections with the associated overhead to various servers around the net.

Now you can turn on the SSL setting on the NewsBlur Web and ensure your data stays private.

And to answer the question of why you wouldn't wan t to use https — it used to mean serving and loading pages over https gave a slight performance hit, but that's no longer true. But some people use http because it will load images from both http and https websites, whereas loading NewsBlur via https means that you can only load images via https, as loading an image via http will throw up a Mixed Content Warning. This update addresses that issue and it is my hope that http-only will be phased out.

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NewsBlur iOS v9: full screen, autoscroll, customizable story titles, story change highlighter, and return to last read story

A whopper of a release with many, many new features!

Autoscroll: Read long stories hands-free

Full screen: Reading stories without the toolbar for a better experience

Longer story titles: New options for longer and shorter story title and content previews in the story titles list

Smaller image previews: New option for smaller image previews in the story titles list

Show story changes: All stories with edits now show a "Show Changes" button at the top that lets you see the differences

Return to last read story: When you return to the app, you will start where you left off

Return to last read scroll position: When you return to a story, you will automatically scroll to where you left off

Take a look at some of the image and story title customizations you can now make:

There's also many smaller fixes that improve the polish of the app:

If you had a slow connection, some stories would take a while to draw while images were downloaded. Now they show immediately

Support for larger iPad Pros

Suport for iOS 13

Fixes for split mode on iPad

Fixes for marking stories as read while scrolling the story titles list

Fixes for navigating stories with an external keyboard

Fixes for scroll performance on the feed list and the story titles list

Fixes for sharing stories accidentally having double titles in emails and messages

Thanks to David Sinclair for putting together this release. Keep up the great work! And if you have ideas for what you'd like to see in the next NewsBlur iOS release, please, please, please submit them to the forum.

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Updates to the Android app and a new addition to the team

Today we have a nice update, version 9.0, of the Android app that includes a rewrite of the story management backend as well as fixes for some critical display issues.

Here's the full list of changes for version 9.0:

Fixes black background for stories while reading with the Light theme.

Total rewrite of the backend story management platform. This fixes the oldest issues known in story paging and scroll state. The story rivers should now act like dynamic views instead of static lists.

New feature: renaming feeds directly in the app.

Improved messaging and display behavior for the original text view.

Fixes for the dark theme's menu color.

Many other bug fixes and performance tweaks.

I'd also like to introduce our newest developer, Caleb Allen.

Caleb will be working on the Android app. Our Android developer Daniel spent the last 5 years with us working many, many versions of the NewsBlur app. I want to thank Daniel for his years of service and we wish him well on his next adventure. And here's hoping for many fruitful years with Caleb!

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The NewsBlur iOS app also hits version 8.0

Fresh off the heels of the Android app hitting version 8.0, today I'd like to announce the latest update to the iOS app. This is a huge release and it's got a lot of new features packed in it. I also want to welcome David Sinclair back to the team. He's the builder behind all the incredible features in this release. Really wonderful having you back, David, and thanks for making v8.0 of the best news reader on a phone.

Here's what's new:

NEW: Save stories offline

NEW: Share stories from other apps into NewsBlur with the new share extension

NEW: Scroll vertically between stories (can be turned on while reading a story)

NEW: 3D Touch links in stories to preview them

NEW: search for sites directly from the feed list

Switching themes no longer reloads the story

iOS 12 compatibility fixes

Upgrading to a premium subscription now handles App Store payment updates

Fixed issue where locking the device while playing a video over Airplay would stop the video

Here's a preview of what a 3D touch on a link looks like:

And sharing stories from other apps directly to your blurblog is now easy to do from the share menu.

Now that David's back there's a lot to look forward to.

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The NewsBlur Android app hits version 8.0 with a new Grid view

Long popular on the NewsBlur web app, the Grid view has now come to the Android app. Have a look for yourself...

There's even a wide and narrow grid view for ultimate customization. And the grid view is saved per-folder/feed, so you can change some folders to use the grid view while leaving others in a list view. And gestures work on individual grid tiles, so you can swipe to mark stories as read/unread while in the Grid view.

Here's a full list of the changes:

The grid view comes to Android. Each feed/folder has its own List view setting

Can scroll all the way past the last story (for marking-read while scrolling through story list)

Fix for Twitter videos

Fix crash for viewing muted feeds

Long press links and images without tags

Better login screen for very small devices

Improved efficiency on thumbnails

Story list position retained on rotate

Android 8 compatibility fixes

Color-blindness-friendly intelligence training

And for those of you using the Amazon App Store, the NewsBlur Android app has been updated there as well.

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Moving to a better support forum at forum.newsblur.com

It's about time NewsBlur had more control of its own support forums. For the past 7 years (to the week!), NewsBlur has been using Get Satisfaction for support, ideas, questions, and praise.

In that time the forums have hosted 6,959 conversations with 6,432 members. And all of that has been imported into the new support forum at https://forum.newsblur.com.

Every topic, every post, every like, and every user is still there. The URLs have changed but the search function is alive and well.

Here's the story with your account. It's still there and you can inherit all of your posting history. But to use your account you will have to go through the forgot password flow, as the passwords were not able to be imported.

Or create a new account. The point of the forum is to post ideas and questions and problems, so if your posting history doesn't come with you, it's not a big deal. It's not like anybody answering the forums looks at your post count and decides whether or not to dive deeper into your question.

I try to do my best in answering every single support thread. At the rates we've seen with nearly 7,000 posts in 7 years, that's an average of 3 per day. Let's keep the posts coming!

And if you're wondering about why I decided to upgrade, the answer is that the new forum software, Discourse, is open-source and allows me to better integrate the forums into other parts of NewsBlur. I have plans to build out the staff in the coming weeks and part of that includes a better support system.

Thanks to Get Satisfaction for all the years of service. You and your cupcake avatars will be missed.

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Intelligence training comes to NewsBlur’s Android app

This is a big deal for Android users. The NewsBlur Android app now fully supports intelligence training and filtering, letting you filter out the stories you don't want to read while highlighting the stories you do want by letting you filter titles, authors, tags, and the publisher.

You used to be able to train by tapping on authors and tags right from the story, but that didn't give you a bird's eye view of an entire feed. You can now clear / modify old intelligence training without going back to the story that set it. And until now you had to use the web or iOS app to train on titles and the publisher itself. Now you can do it all from all of the apps. Check the FAQ for ideas on how to make use of the intelligence trainer.

Here's a list of all the new features in version 7.0 of the Android app:

New Intelligence Trainer. You can train feeds and individual stories: titles, authors, tags, and publishers.

New Infrequent Site Stories view. It's configurable and will show up on iOS and the web soon.

Titles with intelligence training are now highlighted.

You can now switch between light and dark themes from any view.

This is a huge release and we hope you'll find that it makes the NewsBlur reading experience that much better.

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NewsBlur for iPhone X

I'm proud to announce the launch of version 7.0 of the NewsBlur iOS app, complete with iPhone X support. There's a lot that's new and improved in this release.

Also new to the release is that addition of in-app payments for a NewsBlur premium subscription. This was a long time coming. This upgrades the iOS app to match the experience on the web. And because in-app subscriptions are now live, the iOS app will now match the free account restrictions you'll find on the web. As a reminder, NewsBlur is a paid service with free accounts that act as indefinite trials.

Here's a complete list of what's new:

Built for iOS 11 and iPhone X

In app purchases allow you to upgrade to a premium subscription from inside the app

Drag-and-drop on iPad to share stories and images from NewsBlur

New view: Infrequent Site Stories shows stories from feeds that update less than once a day (premium only)

Theme manager in every view for quick color changes

Adding San Francisco font choice

Adding feed list and story list font size controls so you can change size directly from each view

Adding in-app Safari with Reader mode option

Scroll position is now saved, so when you return to a story you maintain your place

New mark as read button on iPad when in landscape or with story titles on bottom

Fixing image sizing on all iPhones and iPads

Updated many layouts for better future compatibility

Fixing unread count badge for users without notifications turned on

Fixing duplicate title/URL in Messages sharing (thanks Nicholas R!)

Fixing compatibility with Firefox (thanks Joe G!)

I hope you enjoy the updated iOS app. I have plans to build new features on top of the app next year, when some huge features will make their debut.

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Infrequent Site Stories is the blog reader we need

Launching today on all three platforms—web, iOS, and Android—is the new Infrequent Site Stories view. This configurable river of news offers a view of stories only from the blogs that publish less often than 1 story per day.

Most of what you see in your day-to-day feed is news that's up to the minute and is probably stale within a day. Even 8 hour old news can be a problem. But sometimes what you want is an overview of the news that isn't exactly news. It's stories from the blogs who have individual authors, or blogs that publish only a few times a month. And missing out on those stories is a tragedy because it is those blogs that pushed you to invest in an RSS reader in the first place.

Today I'm happy to introduce a new feature that you won't find anywhere else. It's called Infrequent Site Stories and you can find it at the top of your feed list on the web, on iOS, and on Android.

Infrequent Site Stories is the river that captures stories from those authors who aren't pulling from the firehose. These are the stories that are more thoughtful and more relevant days, weeks, months, or even years down the line. These stories are not to be missed. And the best thing about these stories is that there are far fewer of them than there are of your normal full river from All Site Stories.

You can also configure the Infrequent river to be more or less inclusive of content that is more or less frequently published by changing the filter anywhere from 5 to 90 stories per month.

These options are also available on all three official NewsBlur platforms and will let you perform a filter similar to how Focus mode reduces your number of unreads. It's great to dip into Infrequent Site Stories and get stories you would ordinarily miss out on.

Try out the new Infrequent Site Stories feed, available only to premium subscribers. If your experience is anything like mine, it'll be one of the new must read feeds in your reader.

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Improved Text view story extraction

The Text view is one of the most popular NewsBlur features. It's available on all three platforms and gives you the full text of the original story, even in truncated RSS feeds. Up until today, NewsBlur's implementation of the Text view used Readability's open source text extractor.

Starting today, all stories will be run through Postlight Labs' Mercury Parser. That means that not only will the full text be more likely to correctly pull the entire article, but it will also do a much better job with extracting full size images in stories.

Take a look:

A welcome improvement. This new text extractor and parser also does a better job of handling Unicode and Chinese characters. And when it doesn't extract text as well as the old text extractor, NewsBlur will automatically fallback on the old method.

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Launching real-time filterable push notifications for iOS, Android, web, and email

For some sites, you want to know when they publish as soon as they publish. Maybe you want to immediately be notified of everything a site publishes, like a monthly meetup that posts an event only once a month. Or perhaps you want to be immediately notified of everything the NYTimes publishes about the companies in your stock portfolio. Or you just really enjoy reading your daily comics and want them emailed to you so you never miss a beat.

Today I'm proud to launch push notifications simultaneously across all three native platforms on NewsBlur (that's web, iOS, and Android). That means that you can setup notifications for all Unread stories or only Focus stories that you've trained to be pushed to you over email, iOS, Android, or through browser notifications on the web.

You can setup all four types of notifications on both web and mobile. And you can employ your intelligence training to only surface the stories that have use certain tags, have specific keywords in the titles, or are written by specific authors. Additionally, it's easy to hide stories using that same training so that you don't receive notifications that you want to ignore.

Push notifications on iOS

To start with notifications on iOS, you can use the new swipe-to-the right gesture on the feed list (replacing the trainer on the swipe gesture). It's very easy to turn notifications on and off or to even step up the filtering on a site so that you only get Focus stories instead.

This way you can overprovision notifications for yourself and easily dial them back to where you get just the right number of notifications.

Today version 7.0 of the NewsBlur iOS app is being released and here's a list of what's new and fixed on iOS:

Push notifications: real-time push notifications on a per-feed basis.

Swipe-to-the-right on a feed to change its notifications.

A new optional app badge for unread counts. Enable under Preferences.

Stories now automatically are marked as read on scroll. Disable under Preferences.

Better image support on iPad and fixes for drag-and-dropping the story titles bar (at bottom of the story detail).

A note on that: you can move story titles to the bottom on iPad. Just drag the bottom bar up.

Fixed issue with sharing stories not working or disappearing on iPad.

Fixed theme issues in the activity share sheet.

Fixed a crash from opening stories with no permalink.

Fixed size of intelligence control on bottom of feed list on iPhone SE.

Fixed issues when story titles are set to the bottom layout on iPad.

Fixed issues with the interactions dialog.

Notifications on Android

Android also gets a new version today. Version 6.0 gets notifications and new custom reading fonts as well as the mark read on scroll behavior that iOS and web have enjoyed.

Here's a list of what's new and fixed on Android:

Mark as read on scroll is a new preference to automatically mark stories as read as you scroll past them.

New fonts for reading: Whitney, Chronicle, Gotham Narrow make their way to Android from the web.

Also supporting native Android fonts Noto Sans, Noto Serif, Open Sans Condensed, and Anonymous Pro.

Switching between Text and Story view is now sticky per-feed (similar to iOS and web).

Fixed issues where feed list would not update.

Notifications on Web

Browser notifications are handy for those sites that you only want to read on your desktop. For example, you could setup web notifications for an RSS feed for a status feed, letting you know when migrations and downtime will have some effect on you.

Setting up and tuning notifications is also just as easy to do on the web. You'll find it under Manage > Notifications as well as in the Read Filter Popover (top right of the app) when reading an individual feed.

Notifications over Email

Finally, for those use cases not covered under web or mobile, you can now have websites automatically email you when they publish new stories.

This is for those stories that you don't want to miss and want to ensure that you read. For instance, I use email notifications for worrydream's quote blog that serves me a single paragraph of insight once a week because I loved having quotes emailed to me.

There you have it, four new ways to consume the news. If you love using NewsBlur and want to see it continue to launch new features like these, please tell friends and followers about your news reader. People often ask for ways to stay on top of the game and NewsBlur is the most powerful way to do it.