Summary
The latest release of Viigo for BlackBerry (2.2.80) is focused primarily on delivering important usability improvements that have been requested by our users in the past few months.
• Improving the frequency with which feeds are updated and delivered
• Allowing more screen real estate for feeds
• Preserving user-defined fonts
• Adding shortcuts
• Supporting One click eMail article to me
• Making it easier to blog from Viigo
• Adding the ability to limit the maximum articles per channel
• Supporting foreign character sets in “full article”
• Adding the ability to synchronize to your Google Reader account
Just this morning, BerryReview.com reviewed this release, awarding it a 9/10 Star ranking and an Editor’s Choice Award.
Performance
Viigo’s user base has grown considerably over the past year … we currently see well over 25,000 new activations each month, and serve millions and millions of articles per day to users worldwide, in over 7 languages. Our Viigo users also have very diverse tastes. Today Viigo tracks, collects and dispatches over 130,000 distinct RSS feeds, some with tens of thousands of readers, others with only a handful.
As some of you will have noticed, all of this has put our servers under strain. The good news is that we’re tackling this issue in a number of ways. First of all, we’re working continuously to optimize our server architecture. This release adds some key improvements that will start to have an impact as more people upgrade. Secondly, we are significantly growing our server capacity, doubling it over the next few weeks as we move to a new data centre. Performance aside, we also have a ton of exciting new features currently under development for future releases, as our recent round of Venture Capital has allowed us to double the size of our development team. Stay tuned for what they’re working on … it’s pretty exciting.
But, you say, developers need to eat, and server farms cost money! How do you do this if you give Viigo away for free?
In order to continue to offer Viigo for free while supporting both the exciting new features we have under development, and our growing server capacity, we have opened Viigo up to advertising. You will notice the debut ad from our partner “American Express”, that has appeared in both the “::Viigo Bulletins” and “FP Trading Desk” feeds. We have been extremely careful to make this the best advertising experience possible, both for our users and for our advertisers. The ads are clean and unobtrusive and are cached so as to require almost no additional bandwidth. For advertisers, we support “Click to Call”, “Click to SMS”, “Click to Email” and “Click to Web”.
“Berry Review” calls this “one of the best executions of mobile advertising [they] have seen to date” and that “Viigo has done a good job of keeping the ads as unobtrusive as possible”. Please head over to http://www.berryreview.com/2008/01/23/viigo-rss-reader-now-has-advertising for more of Ronen’s analysis. We think you may even like the ads … especially some of the Viigo Specific offers that may soon come your way so stay tuned!
More Screen Real-Estate
In the previous version of Viigo, the introduction of support for MMA compliant banner advertisements required that we expand the top bar by a few pixels. This, in addition to the adoption of standard sized icons (you’ll see the exciting reason for this in an up-coming release) resulted in the display of fewer feeds per page.In an effort to optimize screen real estate, we have removed the “My Channels” header (which really served no useful purpose), thereby giving our users the ability to view more channels on the home screen without having to scroll.
User-Defined Fonts
Previous Viigo builds used to partially override BlackBerry’s ‘theme settings’, giving users little choice but to live with what some called “large, squishy, bold text”.As of this release, Viigo will simply use the font you have specified in your Blackberry screen defaults (i.e. the same font as your eMail).
Delete Key shortcut
While Viigo currently supports many of the BlackBerry’s intuitive short cut keys (such as ‘T’ to go to the top of a screen), users were hoping for an easier and faster way to delete feeds they no longer wanted.Viigo’s new release now enables the user to remove feeds - and articles within feeds - instantaneously by hitting the ‘del’ key.
Send Article to Me
In sifting through hundreds of feeds, mobile users often come across one or two articles they would like to save and read at a later date. In addition to allow
ing you to save an article in Viigo, which we have supported for some time, this new release gives users a one-click option to email an article to themselves– all without leaving the application.
How:
When viewing an article, launch the menu and select “Send Article to Me”.
Blogging tools
More and more bloggers are discovering the advantages of using Viigo as their tool of choice for rapidly keeping abreast of and blogging about breaking news while on the go.The convenience of publishing articles directly to one’s blog from within Viigo is indeed appealing. However, in prior releases, the inability to remove “[Viigo]” from the email subject line was proving to be frustrating to users.With the new version of Viigo, users can now customize the subject line … entirely. Post away!
Maximum Articles Per Channel
No two RSS feeds are created equal. Some feeds deliver a handful of articles a day, others deliver hundreds.Until today, Viigo users could only customize the ‘Maximum number of Articles’ cached on their device, but they couldn’t control the ‘Maximum number of Articles Retained Per Channel.’ As a result, some feeds - especially those that published a lot of content each day tended to monopolize Viigo, leaving fewer articles resident in other feeds. No more!With the addition of a Maximum Number of Articles Per Channel option, users are able to set the maximum number of articles they want delivered per channel. This allows users to balance articles across all their channels. The default is 50.
How:
Launch the Menu > Options > Article Settings Foreign Language SupportWe have improved our support for foreign character sets in “Full Article”. All foreign character sets should now be supported.
Support for the Mobile Optimized Web Content
We now have the ability to open “Full Articles” automatically in the browser for feeds that have excellent mobile optimized content.One excellent example of this can be found in the default Reuters feeds (for example Reuters: Business). We encourage you view the articles in this feed, and to click on “Full Article” for a closer look at how well this works.
Google Reader Integration (Phase 1)
You will be pleased to hear that Viigo now allows you to automatically synchronize all your Google Reader feeds.
If you have a Google Reader Account (or a Yahoo, or Bloglines account for that matter) you can now establish a dynamic link to these accounts right from Viigo.Once the link is established, all feeds that you currently subscribe to in your Google Reader account will appear automatically in Viigo. Furthermore, any time you add or remove feeds from your Google Reader Account, these feeds will be added or removed automatically in Viigo.
It may take a few seconds for the first articles to appear in these feeds, so be patient.We call this Google Reader Integration (Phase 1) because it is only the first step in our plans for integration with popular web readers. We’re hoping to offer full read/un-read synchronization in later releases.
How:
In the Channel Library, go to Add your own Channel >Add Aggregator (Google Reader…), and follow the Wizard instructions.
Desktop View
Our articles now have support for the “Desktop View” … i.e. BlackBerry’s emulation of a Desktop Browser.In this mode, a cursor appears, and the browser attempts to display the contents of the article as it would on a larger screen. Moving the pearl, moves the cursor around (useful for selecting Links to follow for example).One interesting use of this feature is to scale images (cartoons, for example) that you want to see at a larger size. Check it out on the Dilbert feed.
