Kevin Cawley Goes Mobile

NewsGator Go! - Trimming the Fat

One of the issues that power users face when trying to consume their RSS feeds on mobile devices is the sheer volume of data… A typical power user may have hundreds of feeds and thousands of unread articles.  On a side, I recently heard Guy Kawasaki say that he has 21K RSS feeds – Wow!

Now, I have built NewsGator Go! in such a way that it can handle this load.  But the fact of the matter is that if you have this much data, it is going to take time to fetch and it is going to take time to load.  This is a result of slower networks and limited device memory which forces me to do some creative File I/O (expensive on mobile) in order to handle large amounts of data.

But do not fear, there is a way to address this issue.  Like I said, if you want all your feeds pumped to your device you can do that, but it may make sense to whittle down your mobile feed set to something that is  more manageable.  This is a piece of cake with NewsGator Go!  It is all based around NewsGator locations!

Here is what you need to do:
    1. Go to NewsGator Online and sign in
    2. Go to My Settings | Edit Locations

   

    3. You will see a NewsGator Go! location that gets automagically created for you.  The name will look like this NGMobile-yourdevicename

       

        a. There is a great option here to enable/disable automatically include new feeds to this location that you should be aware of (I prefer to have new feeds added to my mobile and I can remove later if necessary)
        b. More importantly, you can modify the feed list.  By default all your existing feeds get added to this mobile location so all you have to do is uncheck the feeds you don’t want to show up on your mobile and you are good to Go!

 

This feature kicks butt!  Check it out.

12 comments October 17th, 2006

Stream of News - NewsGator Style

Dave Winer has recently gained much attention over his River of News mobile reader, and this is certainly a good move for mobile and RSS.  Here is a screenshot of the BBC’s River courtesy of Dave’s service.  Very nice!

 

A River of News may not be the ticket for me and others for differing reasons… I prefer a richer experience and a more structured view of my feeds. But the River of News does have its place and folks are asking for this feature.  In the next version of NewsGator Go!, I will be incorporating this concept with a slightly different spin… I call it a Stream of News.

I can let the river flow for all my news by selecting the root folder and opening up the fire hose, see below…

Or I can just flow the news at the folder level and read just a tributary of the river… ie, the stream.  And of course, marking articles read synchronizes the article with all NewsGator products.  I can also chose to remove the articles from the list as they are read (my preference) w/o post backs.  Here is what the Stream of News looks like on NewsGator Go!

I hope this helps and improves the NewsGator Go! experience!

4 comments October 17th, 2006