Unread 3.4.4 is available from the App Store. This update fixes a bug that caused subscriptions imported from some OPML files to have blank titles.

If you enjoy using Unread, please consider purchasing a subscription. Unread subscribers can enable caching of webpage text and images, choose an alternative app icon, save arbitrary webpages to Unread, and more.

It is easy to subscribe to more feeds than you have time to read, or more content than you even have time to scroll through. I subscribe to an inordinate number of feeds myself. I want to share a trick for managing this.

I subscribe to 475 feeds. About half of the new articles I see each day comes from 8 of those feeds. And while I often enjoy articles from those 8 high-volume feeds, they generate a disproportionate number of articles that I am not interested in reading. I have a tag called “High Volume” containing just those 8 feeds. When I fall behind and my number of unread articles is more than I want to go through, I first mark all articles with the High Volume tag read. I do that by long-pressing the “High-Volume” tag and selecting “Mark All Read” from the resulting menu. This trick helps me quickly focus on the articles I am more likely to read.

Unread 3.4.3 is available from the App Store with these improvements:

• This update makes theme change animations a bit smoother.
• This update fixes a bug that made the article view move around when selecting text in an article using a trackpad.

If you enjoy using Unread, please consider purchasing a subscription. Unread subscribers can enable caching of webpage text and images, choose an alternative app icon, save arbitrary webpages to Unread, and more.

Unread 3.4.2 is available from the App Store. This update contains these improvements:

• This update incorporates Inoreader’s new icon.
• This update fixes a bug that prevented password changes for Feedbin accounts from being saved.
• This update fixes a bug that affected the display of images associated with gearnews.com articles. This fix will apply to articles downloaded after installing this update.
• This update makes the Mark All Read operation slightly faster under some circumstances.

If you enjoy using Unread, please consider purchasing a subscription. Unread subscribers can enable caching of webpage text and images, choose an alternative app icon, save arbitrary webpages to Unread, and more.

Unread 3.4.1 is available from the App Store. This update fixes a bug that prevented the article list for a folder or tag from working if that folder or tag was assigned to over 1000 feed subscriptions.

Unread 3.4 is available from the App Store. This update adapts to the shutdown of Feed Wrangler:

• Feed Wrangler accounts can no longer be added to Unread.
• Unread no longer tries to refresh Feed Wrangler accounts.
• Unread no longer deletes outdated articles from Feed Wrangler accounts.
• The ability to subscribe to a feed, edit a feed subscription, and unsubscribe from a feed is disabled for Feed Wrangler accounts.
• The ability to add, edit, and remove smart streams is disabled for Feed Wrangler accounts.
• Marking articles read/unread and starred/unstarred still works, but those changes are no longer synced in Feed Wrangler accounts.

The ability to import subscriptions into an Unread Cloud or Local account from a Feed Wrangler account that is not already synced to the device is disabled as well.

If you were using Feed Wrangler and have not yet setup a new account, Unread will let you import subscriptions from a synced Feed Wrangler account into an Unread Cloud account or Local account. Unread also lets you export your subscriptions from a synced Feed Wrangler account to an OPML file. Please get in touch if you need assistance. The Feed Wrangler website still offers subscription exports and migration to Feedbin.

This update also incorporates these improvements:

• This update adds bug fixes around subscribing to YouTube RSS feeds.
• This update fixes a bug that prevented retrieval of webpage text for articles from dw.com.
• This update fixes bugs around Unread’s trackpad support on the iPadOS 16.4 beta.

Feedly on Twitter:

This is a friendly note to inform you that we'll be conducting maintenance tomorrow (Saturday, February 4th) at 6AM PST 🚧

The maintenance will last up to 6 hours.

You can monitor the status of the service on status.feedly.com

Thanks for your patience!

Check Feedly’s status page and Twitter account for updates.

Feed Wrangler is scheduled to shut down on March 1, 2023, just about one month from now. I want to let customers know how Unread will adapt to this. These changes will only affect customers using a Feed Wrangler account.

As soon as possible after Feed Wrangler shuts down I am going to release an update that removes the ability to add a Feed Wrangler account to Unread. Feed Wrangler accounts that are already added will remain present but have limited functionality, specifically:

• Unread will no longer try to refresh Feed Wrangler accounts.
• Unread will no longer delete outdated articles from Feed Wrangler accounts.
• The ability to subscribe to a feed, edit a feed subscription, and unsubscribe from a feed will be disabled for Feed Wrangler accounts.
• The ability to add, edit, and remove smart streams will be disabled for Feed Wrangler accounts.
• Marking articles read/unread and starred/unstarred will continue to work, but those changes will not sync in Feed Wrangler accounts.

The ability to import subscriptions into an Unread Cloud or Local account from a Feed Wrangler account that is not already synced to the device will be disabled as well.

If you are using Feed Wrangler and Unread is your only RSS reader, Unread Cloud will likely be a suitable replacement. You can import your subscriptions directly from a Feed Wrangler account into an Unread Cloud account or a Local account.

If you use Unread in combination with other RSS readers or if you need a web interface, I recommend Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, or NewsBlur. Feedbin has a migration tool that migrates subscriptions, starred articles, and the read/unread status of articles from a Feed Wrangler account. This is available via your Feed Wrangler account page.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or need assistance.

Unread 3.3.1 is available from the App Store with these improvements:

• This update fixes a bug that would cause syncing with a NewsBlur account to miss articles under some circumstances.
• This update fixes a bug that would cause the Readwise article action to disable itself under some circumstances.

If you enjoy using Unread, please consider purchasing a subscription. A subscription adds the new Save to Unread share sheet extension, article actions, caching of webpage text and images, custom app icons, and more.

Since releasing Unread 3.3 with Save to Unread I have heard from a few customers who did not initially see Save to Unread or Subscribe in Unread in the share sheet. I imagine others have the same question. Both Save to Unread and Subscribe in Unread appear in the set of actions listed vertically with monochrome icons:

If you use either action frequently, you can add it to your set of Favorites as follows:

1. Tap the Edit Actions button at the very bottom of the share sheet.

2. Find Save to Unread or Subscribe in Unread in the Other Actions section.

3. Tap the green plus (“+”) sign next to the action.

Adding an action to Favorites puts the action closer to the top of the share sheet.

Unread 3.3 adds the ability to create an article from a webpage, a Readwise article action, and more. This update is available now from the App Store.

Create an Article From a Webpage

Visit any webpage with Safari or any other browser, open the share sheet, and select Save to Unread. Unread will create a new article with the content of that webpage. In an Unread Cloud account, Local account, or NewsBlur account, the new article will be added to Saved Articles. In a Feedbin account the new article will be added to your set of Pages. In a Feedly account the new article will be added to Read Later.

Similarly when reading an article, the long press menu for a link now includes an Add to Saved Articles, Save to Pages, or Save to Read Later menu item. Selecting that menu item will create a new article with the content of the linked webpage.

In Feedbin accounts, Pages now appears under Articles on the account screen — under Unread Articles, All Articles, and Starred Articles. It no longer appears as a feed subscription.

In Feedly accounts and NewsBlur accounts, articles saved from webpages are initially marked read and cannot be marked unread.

This functionality is available for Unread Cloud, Local, Feedbin, Feedly, and NewsBlur accounts. The Save to Unread share sheet extension requires an Unread Subscription.

Readwise Article Action

This article action lets you quickly save articles and links to Readwise Reader. After enabling the article action and signing in, you can send any article to Readwise by long pressing it in the article list and selecting Readwise from the resulting menu, by swiping left from any article and selecting Readwise from the resulting menu, or by using the option-r hardware keyboard shortcut from the article list or from an article. You can also send any link inside an article to Readwise by long pressing that link and selecting Readwise from the resulting menu.

Article actions require an Unread Subscription.

Additional Improvements

• Unread now detects Link articles from onethingwell.org and techmeme.com. This change applies to articles downloaded after installing this update. To view both the feed article and the article to which it links, open the article, swipe the screen to the left, select Display from the resulting menu, and then select Feed & Webpage Text from the resulting submenu. Select All Link Articles at the resulting prompt to make that change apply to all link articles from that feed.
• When invoked on lobste.rs linked list articles, the share sheet and article actions now use the linked article URL instead of the lobste.rs URL.
• This update adds improvements to the way feeds from ooh! directory are presented in the Subscribe in Unread share sheet extension.
• This update adds significant performance improvements around loading and caching both webpage text and images.
• This update adds modest performance improvements around syncing Unread Cloud and Local accounts.
• This update incorporates bug fixes around Unread’s VoiceOver support.
• This update incorporates bug fixes around GIFs shown full screen.
• This update incorporates bug fixes around inline SVGs.
• This update fixes a bug that caused the article view to move around when sliding your finger to scrub video or audio.
• This update adds improvements to avoid images flickering in the article list.
• When unable to retrieve webpage text for an article, Unread now shows the message “Webpage Text Unavailable” on the article screen as static text instead of as a message that floats up from the bottom of the screen.
• When in Low Data Mode, Unread will not cache webpage text or images.
• When using the system font size setting, Unread imposes maximum font sizes in order to ensure that the text can be displayed within the app’s layout. With this update those maximum font sizes are much larger on iPad. The maximum font sizes are unchanged on iPhone. The maximum font sizes are also unchanged when Unread has a narrow Split View, Slide Over, or Stage Manager window. When using a very large font size on iPad, the swipe left menu does not show icons.

This update required changes to the privacy policy, specifically:

• Our servers are used to generate article content for articles saved from webpages under most circumstances.
• Our servers store articles saved from webpages to Unread Cloud accounts.
• The privacy policy now links to the Readwise Privacy Policy, as it applies to articles saved to Readwise via the new article action.

Unread 3.3 requires iOS/iPadOS 16.2 or later.

Unread 3.3 is available now from the App Store. If you enjoy using Unread, please consider purchasing a subscription. A subscription adds the new Save to Unread share sheet extension, article actions, caching of webpage text and images, custom app icons, and more.

Inoreader on Twitter:

Due to issues in our secondary data center, you might experience issues with some functionality like search, newsletter subscriptions and accessing very old articles. Our engineers are working on restoring all services as fast as possible. We apologize for the issue.

In a follow-up tweet:

Some details: We've had 3 major power surges today (so far). The first one caused our UPS to fail and to get stuck in bypass mode. A 140+ TB ceph storage cluster is still repairing with multiple failed HDDs after 3 consecutive power failures. This takes time...

In another follow-up tweet:

... No data loss is expected since we also have offline tape backups of everything, but it could take some time to restore articles archive prior to 2019. The other service that is currently affected is the newsletter subscriptions since our email provider is also in this DC.

I recommend checking @Inoreader on Twitter for updates.

This past year brought several big improvements to Unread including:

• Unread Cloud, a syncing and article retrieval system for Unread.
• Local accounts that take advantage of the Unread Cloud infrastructure for fast article retrieval.
• Subscribe in Unread, a share sheet extension making it easy to subscribe to feeds offered by the website you are visiting.

Social Media

This past year brought big changes to the social media landscape. You can now follow Unread on Mastodon or through a fediverse-compatible social network such as Micro.blog at @unread@mastodon.goldenhillsoftware.com.

For now I am continuing to maintain Unread’s Twitter presence. If that changes I will announce that both here on this blog and through the @goldenhillsw and @unread_app Twitter accounts.

In Unread 3.2.1 I added the ability to discover Mastodon feeds. And while I am not going to turn Unread into a Mastodon app, I am thinking about whether there are additional ways Unread should adapt to the growth of Mastodon and the fediverse.

Feed Wrangler

Feed Wrangler announced in April that it is shutting down on March 1, 2023. That is now only two months away.

If you are using Feed Wrangler and Unread is your only RSS reader, Unread Cloud should be a suitable replacement. You can import your subscriptions directly from a Feed Wrangler account into an Unread Cloud account or a Local account.

If you use Unread in combination with other RSS readers or if you rely on Feed Wrangler’s web interface, I recommend Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, or NewsBlur. Feedbin has a migration tool that migrates subscriptions, starred articles, and the read/unread status of articles from a Feed Wrangler account. This is available via your Feed Wrangler account page.

Almost immediately after Feed Wrangler shuts down I will release an update to Unread that adapts to this change.

Looking Ahead

I have been working on a feature update that I expect to release within the next several weeks.

My next major development focus for Unread will be a Mac version. I am going to start work on that soon. I cannot estimate when that will ship, and it will likely not be in 2023. But I plan to focus as much as possible this coming year on Unread for the Mac.

Happy New Year!