To summarize the new changes that have gone in since this post originally went up:
Ability to set interface language and content language
Ability to override the font size in the app settings so you don’t have to follow the notification size setting from the system
Added Timeline pins as an opt-in feature to remind you when the Kagi News refresh time will be for the next couple days
This includes the addition of some of the “Today In History” stories that I put into the description of the pin to have it be a bit more interesting to have around on your Timeline
Updated the highlight colors on color Pebbles to the same orange used on the rest of the branding (which is a close analogy to Kagi’s orange)
Added marking stories as read when you interact with the summary page (scroll or open available details)
Added some new developer settings
You can clear the Timeline Pin memory, which is a feature that prevents the app from pushing Timeline Pins it has already pushed, even after you “Remove” them from the Timeline
You can clear the read stories memory
Overall, I am pretty happy with the state of things feature-wise. I think my major next features changes would end up being:
Today In History in the app instead of just on the Timeline Pins
Pulling categories from the API instead of having to hardcode them (today I have to push a new release to add categories)
I believe this will require me to stop using Clay, but it’s possible I can do something funky to Clay to push in dynamic data
But I think before I get to either of those the next steps I am going to be focusing on optimization. As I keep adding features I can feel the app getting slower and the code getting more confused in certain aspects over time. The performance issues are minor (I had to make someone record my watch in slomo so I could see that it is refreshing too slow) but they exist and will keep adding up. So for now, unless I have a change of heart, I think this is how it’ll be so I can focus on optimization for this app and work on some other apps I have planned. After I come out of that I plan to come back to keep up on this, because I use it every day and want it to work for me.
Added support for the Kagi Small Web feed in addition to Kagi News! Enable it in the app configuration.
Kagi Small Web is a system for publishing content from “small web” blogs. Consider its inclusion minimal and in development, but working as much as the rest of the News feature!
Automatically select the only option in the details lists when only one is available (still preserves the back stack for continuity)
Had to do a couple quick updates after this, but I’ve been running Kagi Small Web as a hack on my local build of Kagi News for a while. I turned it into a full, albeit still hacky, feature and pushed it.
Kagi Small Web for the uninitiated is an effort by Kagi to community source and distribute updates to “small web” blogs and web pages via Search and the Kagi Small Web service which also serves an Atom feed. This feed is what is being shown in the app now when enabled and it leverages the same patterns as the rest of the News app to show the title, summary, and a QR code to continue reading on your phone.
Hopefully it’s of interest to others. I’ll work on other tangential feeds to News in the future (like Today In History which is basically already done but I don’t care enough about to look at) to continue distracting me from actually optimizing anything in this mess of code.
Update alert!
James Downs just released version 1.5 of Kagi News!
Update alert!
Update alert!
Update alert!
Update alert!