Questions about syncing with Google Reader

[annathepiper]

Hi, I'm a new iPad owner and I bought feedHopper for the device, hoping to take advantage of how it syncs with Google Reader AND reads authenticated feeds, according to what I saw in the descriptions in the user guide.

However, I'm having trouble getting syncing to work. Can someone confirm for me whether two-way article syncing is supposed to work in the current version of the app? Also, is it supposed to sync on its own or does this work only if I tap the sync button?

I'm asking because if I tap the sync button, I do see unread articles come down from my Google Reader account. But the reverse does not seem to work--i.e., if I read an article on the iPad, Google Reader does not update to show that change, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose for me.

Also: if article syncing is supposed to automatically work, how long should the average sync take? The behavior I've seen this morning is that with seven unread articles showing in my web login of Google Reader, none of them come down on their own to the app. But if I just let it sit and idle, I see a spinning wheel on my iPad, indicating that the app is trying to do _something_. It's done this for at least half an hour though and I have seen no sign of any articles showing up.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Angela

[doug@dyerware.com]

First, thanks for buying fH.  It is much appreciated!

You are correct that fH does both google sync and supports several types of feed authentication, so don't worry what you are asking it SHOULD do

When does fH sync with google?

When you read an article (or change the state of the favorites, etc) INSIDE fH, a notification message is sent to your google reader account immediately.  Large bulk actions (such as marking an entire folder as read) will take a few seconds in the background to complete... you can keep an eye on the network indicator to see the traffic happening.

When you read an article (or change the state of the favorites, etc) OUTSIDE fH, fH will not know about these changes until the feed is refreshed (Note that if you are staring at your google reader page when you read an article in fH, you will have to click on the feed name on the left again to have it refresh the articles list).

When does fH not sync an article?
 
If you downloaded articles before you enabled Google Sync, then those articles will not sync in either direction.  Don't worry, eventually they will scroll off the face of the earth in fH as new articles become available.  This is just how Google works: It cannot identify articles unless they are downloaded from Google (fH is handed a special id for the article).

If you read or change the favorites, etc.  when offline, those changes are not sync'ed.

If the 'Sync with google' setting for the feed is set to OFF, no articles will be synced.  If you later enable syncing, any of the old articles downloaded prior to the enabling will not be sync'ed (same reason as when you have google sync globally disabled).

If the feed uses HTTPS, or authentication, google in general rejects it (most likely you do not have these feeds in your google account because of this).



You could be experiencing a bug as well.  THere is an update still not out of Apple's review process yet that does fix some things with Google Reader, but I cant say there were issues where reading did not get reflected in the Google account (I just double-checked to be sure).

I have subscribed to this thread for instant replies..... please post back if you have a bug or questions, am here to help.  An update is being worked on and a bug with Google Sync would be very important to fix

[annathepiper]

Thank you very kindly!

Quick update: I closed and restarted the app and observed that syncing did then start working. I read an article in the app, waited a short time, and saw my login on Google Reader properly update itself. I also saw the issue go away of the spinnywheel chugging for many minutes without any apparent result.

_But_, I did also notice that the count of articles on the feed where I'd read the article, on the app, went down to -1. This happened on two different feeds. Is this possibly one of the things you all have fixed in the upcoming release?

Also, thanks very much for an app that both syncs with Google Reader AND does authenticated feeds. Your app's the only one I've been able to find that'll do that. I've got some issues with the UI (I really, REALLY want to be able to move between articles by swipe gestures), but I'm willing to deal with those for the sake of the functionality actually being what I need.

Angela

[doug@dyerware.com]

LOL -1 implies a miscommunication.  Those numbers get recalculated each time fH starts, btw, so don't think its forever stuck wrong.  Some of that stuff was part of the unreleased patch, but if you get issues afterwards please post back.  Sounds like maybe there is some network stickiness going on that fH does not defend well against.

The swipe gestures for fH when reading are all two- or three-finger based:
Three Swipe left to right to go to top article
Three Swipe right to left to go to bottom article
Three Double-tap for toggling widescreen/normal viewing
Two Swipe left to right to go to prev article
Two Swipe right to left to go to next article


In the mean time, I find the up/down buttons in the upper right toolbar handy for next/prev as the thumb rests right there.  Incidentally the reason for the three-fingers is because one- and two- finger gestures pan/shrink the article view.

[annathepiper]

So noted about the -1 thing! And thanks for the tips on the swipe gestures.

So wait I'm confused about the two-finger gestures--I see that yes, I can in fact navigate between the articles with two fingers (yay!), but I'm not seeing how to shrink or zoom an article? Pinch gestures don't seem to work...?

[doug@dyerware.com]

Sorry I clarified my post above 
Two-finger swipes for next/prev and three for first/last. 

The pinch zoom is only if you have full article text or are viewing the full web page in the detail view (press the link chain button to open the web page for the article). 

If you wanted the complete article downloaded and not just the contents from googles feed, edit the feed settings, go to 'rss content' and enable Full Article.  Takes a few seconds more to download.  Also, when enabling Full Article, enable Reading Mode if you have not done that.  You can turn off Reading Mode at any time without redownloading anything... its just a nice way to view articles that have been downloaded with Full Article on.


-d

[annathepiper]

Cool, thank you VERY much for your help! Most appreciated.