Juice said:
Bought Byline and I HATE IT.
It syncs, stars, notes, opens items just fine, but it gets the fundamentals of reading RSS all wrong
* No "mark all as read" anywhere
* Every content receptacle only loads 25 items at a time? WTF? At any given time, my Google Reader will have between 1,200 and 15,000 unread items. 25 new items per folder is a COMPLETE JOKE.
* Folders just appear/disappear, requiring me to quit the app and reopen it frequently.
* no UIScrollView to read posts and summaries, instead I'm just forced to arrow through every single post screen-by-screen, or else they'll never get marked as read.
I'll give it a chance tomorrow to see how it does over EDGE, but this will probably be the first app for which I request a refund.
Whoa. A couple of things, although 15K new items is a pathological use case for any software that might run on a mobile phone. How do you ever actually read all of those articles in the course of a day? I'm barely able to keep up with the 500ish that show up per day in my RSS reader.
1) Preferences for the application are under Settings, not within the app itself. You can alter how many items you want per folder to as many as 200. (From what I understand, the 200-item limit was derived from Mail -- basically, since Apple doesn't think having more than 200 items loaded is a good idea, neither should Byline.) That doesn't help with the single New Items folder, which will be capped at 200, but since each individual folder can hold up to 200, you can get a lot more items loaded up per sync.
2) Folders persist for as long as you have unread items. (I don't have my iPhone handy, but I'm pretty sure that it has a "keep unread items" preference which would have the effect of keeping all folders there.)
3) "Mark all as read" appears at the bottom of every folder when there are no more new items to load. (In other words, if you have things set to 200 per folder, and there are 145 new items, the "mark all as read" appears at the bottom of the list.) The only way to apply it globally, however, is from the bottom of the New Items folder -- but again, that presupposes that all of your new items fit in the folder.
4) Performance over EDGE is painful, to say the least, but that's partly because AT&T is still actively gimping EDGE in favor of 3G. I have mine set to only archive starred items or noted items for offline reading, and only to load the summaries otherwise.
I'm very sorry that I steered you wrong...but it also sounds like you might have missed some of the features. Hopefully some of this is helpful.