MayorJustin.com

Crashes, Old Articles, Slow Backups

It has come to my attention that people are still battling some crashes, slow backups, and old articles hanging aroud.

I’m not happy about this to say the least.

Over the past 2 days I have been exchanging emails with a Manifesto user that has been experiencing these problems and I think I may finally have them solved.

But, there is always a but, I want to make sure its fixed. In order to do that, I need some help from you guys.  More specifically, I need your crash logs and Manifesto data from your iTunes Backup.  Here is how to get that data to me:

- Leave a comment on this post with your email or send me an email if you have my email. I’ll email you back.

-  Open up finder and go to your home directory and then Library/CrashReporter/MobileDevice

- Grab any file that has Manifesto in its name, zip them up and send them to me

- Additionally, I want your Manifesto data(articles and feeds).  Check out this article on how to send me application data from your iTunes backups.

If you’ve contacted me before about any of the following problems and are still experiencing them, contact me again with the above information:

- Slow backups

- Crashes

- Articles not being deleted

Manifesto 1.0.5 Details

Since the 1.0.4 release, great feedback has been pouring in.  I’ve logged pretty much every suggestion / bug that has come to me.

As most of you know 1.0.5 was supposed to be about folders, but we are going to flip things as a result of your feedback.

1.0.6 and 1.0.5, or better known as Caching and Folders, are going to be switched.

This will upset some people, but I think it will make more people happy than not.

Once I get enough data from you guys to know that I’ve solved the problems I mentioned at the top of the article, I will post up more formal details of what to expect in 1.0.6 besides better caching and the above fixes.

Thanks for your feedback, keep it coming!

-Justin

Just got word from Apple that Manifesto 1 .0.4 is available on iTunes, go get it!

I’ll update this thread with some new screenshots tomorrow.

Enjoy! And keep the feedback coming!

- Justin

Better late than never, right?Rather than bore you with why its late, here are the details:

Fixes / Enhancements

• Article TableViewCells now have more room for headlines as the date has been shifted down a line
• Support for International Date Format
• Article Summary View Title expands to show full title
• Revamped Details View
• Added Feed Name, created new Flag/Unflag Button

New User Options

• Disable Auto Rotation
• Have articles deleted same day

1.0.5 Details

1.0.5 is under development as we speak.  

Everything I outlined in a prior post is still on the table for 1.0.5 plus what got cut from 1.0.4 which is mainly restoring Manifesto to the same state before it was last closed.  That feature, for performance reasons, will require some database modifications and I decided to do a bunch of database changes at once rather than over 2 releases. 1.0.6 will also bring some database modifications but this will help set the stage for that.

So get ready…folders are coming!  That is a feature I’ve really wanted recently as my list of RSS feeds continue to grow.

Thanks for all of the feedback, keep it coming! I do read every comment.

So what’s going on with Manifesto, to be honest, not enough.

This evening I went through every piece of feedback that has been submitted through this site and via email.  At MS, we call this a triage…

What came of it?

A bunch of things:

1. Manifesto isn’t updated enough
2. There are a huge range of suggestions for features that people want to see in Manifesto
3. Everyone wants to see Google Reader Syncing

So lets go through all 3 of these.

Updates

Originally, I was planning to have one big release towards the beginning of February and this was going to address everything(solve world hunger, speed up your internet, bring back Alf…everything).

I quickly realized a release of this magnitude is exactly what I hate about software development at the company I work at…big, slow, users left out of the loop.

So we are going to correct that in a big way:

• 1.0.4 - 2/1/2009
• 1.0.5 - 2/15/2009
• 1.0.6 - 2/22/2009

3 Releases in 6 weeks.  Compare that to 4 releases in 5 months, that is a big improvement.

The dates listed there are when I’ll be submitting the update to Apple.  In the past it takes 2-3 days for them to approve and post an update.

Tons of feedback, what gets addressed?

The amount of feedback has been absolutely awesome and its amazing to see all the different ways that people use the application.

So here is what we are going to address in the next 6 weeks:

1.0.4 - Housekeeping 

• Restore Manifesto to the state that it was in before it was closed.  Every ‘good’ iPhone app does this, its about time Manifesto did.
• New User Options
  • Disable Auto Rotation
  • Ability to use International or US date format
  • Adjustable font sizes
• UI Cleanup
  • Article list entries, when sorted by date, have their title cut off often by displaying the date to the right.  Date will be moved to the next line so it will be very similar to the sort by feed display
  • Long article titles are cut off in the details view, this will no longer be the case
  • User will be alerted when there is an error loading an articles web page
  • Support for adjustable font sizes

1.0.5 - Organizing

• User editable feed order
• User created categories(folders) and ability to put a feed in a category.  When accessing the feeds tab, you’ll first see all your categories and can then hammer down to the actual feeds
• Ability to have New and Flagged aggregate views sorted by category

1.0.6 - Get Caching Right

• Revamp of caching system(hopefully this will speed up iTunes backups)
• Cache images
• Load cached pages faster when online, currently when you’re online, cached articles really don’t load much faster
• Prioritize article caching with respect to feed updating.  Article caching will be treated with a lower priority.

Don’t see a feature or fix you want? Let me know, I’m always listening. Leave a comment!

Google Reader Syncing

I want to do this, I really do.  Everytime I sit down and work on it, it gets me a bit frustrated because the API provided by Google really stinks.  I’ll go into this a bit more in a later post, but for now I’ll leave you with this: It doesn’t do everything I want it to in order to provide the best experience and I don’t want to compromise Manifesto. You can look at other apps out there and see where the compromises have been made to ‘fit’ the Google Reader API

Manifesto Lite

I want to put Manifesto into the hands of more people.  While I think having it priced at $1.99 is a great price, there are still people that are hesitant.

I appreciate all of the early adopters that paid $1.99 and I’m not going to turn my back on them and lower the price.

However, I am going to be releasing a ‘Lite’ version of Manifesto along with the 1.0.4 release.

Manifesto ‘Lite’ will be fully functional, except for 2 key things:

1. Only support 3 feeds
2. No import from Google Reader

That’s it! If you’ve been hesitant or have friends that have been hesitant, Manifesto Lite will be an awesome way to test drive Manifesto.

Okay, thats all for now!

Justin

Wedding
It’s been quite an exciting time for me over the past month with the apex being my wedding which turned out perfect.  My wife and I could not have asked or dreamed of anything better.As you can imagine, I’ve had very little to no time to work on Manifesto, but that is about to change.

Manifesto 1.0.3
As I’m typing this, Manifesto 1.0.3 is being built for submission to iTunes.  This is a very small release that focuses on 1 primary bug:

• Inability to edit feeds due to an immediate crash when tapping on a feed.

Future of Manifesto
The future of Manifesto can be summarized by a quote from one of my favorite movies…”To infinity and beyond!”

Being that I use Manifesto several times a day, I have a ton of ideas and requests for it.  In addition, I have a ton of a feedback from all of you.  So later this week, I’ll be posting a detailed and prioritized list of features / fixes / etc that will be considered for future releases.
Keep the feedback coming and tell your friends about Manifesto!
- Justin

iLounge recently reviewed every RSS app for the iPhone(11 Total) and Manifesto came out on top as one of their top 2 picks.

Here are just a few things they had to say about Manifesto:

“Manifesto ($2) is a breath of fresh air: a robust, full-featured app missing only a couple of features.”

“Manifesto is one of the most usable RSS readers for the iPhone OS, with a clean, smart interface, flagging and offline viewing support, a variety of options from which to add new feeds, and a well-implemented built-in browser view.”

Of course, Manifesto is not perfect, and they offered some great suggestions on how to make it better:

“It’s not perfect, but it’s as close as we could expect from a $2 app; true two-way syncing with Google Reader or other online services could make it even better.”

Overall, they gave Manifesto an “A-”.

As I’ve alluded to before in previous posts, Manifesto is not done and I will be addressing the syncing issue among others soon.

Thanks to everyone who told me about this and also to everyone who has submitted feedback of their own, I really appreciate it!

- Justin

Thanks to everyone who has submitted feedback, suggestions and most importantly bug reports!

Manifesto 1.0.2 has been submitted to Apple!

I apologize for how long its taken this update to be released. I’ve been swamped with work at my job and also really busy getting ready for my wedding coming up in November. Hopefully the breadth of issues fixed in this release and also the new features included make up for it!

In an effort to one up Apple and show a little more transparency to the development process behind Manifesto, I’ll be giving everyone a little more detail than describing the 1.0.2 update as ‘Bug Fixes.’

Below is a detailed list of all the new features and bug fixes included in 1.0.2:

Bug Fixes:

• Passwords with non alpha-numeric characters do not work when importing feeds from Google Reader (Perry)
• Http:// is added to feed or website URL when user has already entered http:// (Damion)
• Article summary text should use a sans-serif font (Butch)
• Missing article summaries (Josh)
• Article title does not take up all the space it can in article lists
• Can not import feeds from Google Reader twice in one session. Second attempt results in NSURLErrorDomain error -1012 (Perry)
• Duplicate articles sometimes appear in ‘New’ aggregate view while feeds are being refreshed

Crash Fixes:

• Crash when adding feeds hosted on FeedBurner (Chris)
• Crash when trying to email link to article that contains non alpha numeric characters in title
• Crash when quickly advancing through articles using the up/down buttons
• Low memory crash when viewing an article (Simon)

New Features:

• Ability to group aggregate views by date (Bill,Eric)
• User preference to set default grouping behavior for aggregate views - Date or Feed (Default)
• User preference to update feeds on application launch (Default-Off)

Here are some screen shots of the new preferences and group by date:

Hopefully most of everyone’s major concerns have been addressed at this point.

If they have not been addressed or something new comes up, definitely drop me a line via comments!

Quick note, there have been many many requests for syncing with Google Reader, I will be talking about this in the very near future. I’ll also be outlining what bug fixes and small features you can expect in the 1.0.3 update!

Justin

First off, thanks to everyone who has downloaded Manifesto and made the launch weekend a great success!

An even bigger thanks goes out to everyone who used both this website and iTunes to leave feedback about Manifesto!

Like any piece of software, Manifesto has bugs and I really appreciate all the help you guys have given me to identify and track down these bugs.

Last Thursday night, I submitted the 1.0.1 update to Apple. Unfortunately, I am still waiting for Apple to approve it.

Just so you guys know what’s coming, below is a list of the bug fixes in the 1.0.1 update:

• Application Badge is not updated sometimes
• Mark all as Flagged operates on all articles instead of only displayed articles (Thanks Florian)
• Date errors with some feeds(Thanks Florian, Eric, Bill)
• Duplicate article downloads when articles do not have a date published field(Thanks Florian, Bill)

Note: Due to a change with the way dates are read, you ‘may’ see duplicate articles the first time you refresh1.0.1 was a very small update that hopefully addresses some critical issues.

Stay tuned, there are more updates(that are bigger!) in the pipeline…

Late last night Manifesto was put up for sale on the iTunes App store!

Spread the word!

Download it here!

If you want to know more about Manifesto or want to leave feedback go here.

Thanks!

Justin

As many of you are aware, I’ve been working on an iPhone application in the little spare time that I have.

The day has finally come. Today I submitted Manifesto 1.0 to the iTunes App Store.

What is Manifesto?

In its simplest terms, its the app that I’ve wanted on the iPhone since I got it last year. Its an RSS Reader. More than that, its hopefully a ‘News’ reader to people who aren’t familiar with RSS.

Download it from the App Store here.

What sets Manifesto apart?

The main goal as I was building Manifesto was to make it an extremely efficient news reader and not just a rehash of whats out there. Most people have a bunch of feeds that are updated several times a day and it can often be extremely tedious to figure out which articles are important and which are not. Manifesto makes that process easy with its aggregate view of new articles and also with quick flagging.

The second, and maybe more important, goal of Manifesto was to make it the best offline news reader. Manifesto makes viewing your news offline seamless.

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