Do you also have articles stuck on your read list or episodes on your play list? Then you are also a victim of an error in Google Reader which — when occurring — prevents you from removing a tag from an article. You can even try to remove the tag using the Google Reader web interface and you will also fail.

Until today your only option to “fix” this was to rename the affected tag in the Google Reader web interface (as described here). GoodNews 4.4.0 now brings another workaround: It allows you to delete such articles and put them on a blacklist, so that they will be ignored during subsequent syncs.

To do so, simply bring up the article list of the relevant label, tap and hold the affected article to bring up it’s context menu and choose the delete entry at the end of the menu. Afterwards this article will never appear again in GoodNews unless you clear the blacklist using “Settings > Other > Clear article blacklist”.

Please keep in mind, that this still is only a workaround, because if you take a look into your Google Reader web interface you will see that the articles still appear there. The only one who can fix this is Google and if you want to increase the pressure you should +1 the error report I’ve created in the Google Reader forum.

I know, I know: This is an incredible number of updates in a short time frame, but I’ve found another issue: Since GoodNews 4.1 the text size for the article view is no longer respected. GoodNews 4.3.3 fixes this.

GoodNews 4.3.2 is an emergency fix for the problem that articles are no longer shown for the starred tag and the read list and play list tag. The release is available and Google play! now.

GoodNews 4.3.1 is a pure maintenance release that fixes three nasty issues:

• Correct subscription order in grouped article list when returning from article view
• No restriction for number of article title lines

• Fixed negative numbers in storage statistics

Version 4.3.0 is available at Google play! with immediate affect. It is a smaller release which introduces some details enhancements. The most obvious enhancement is the support of a third mobilizer for optimizing web sites for mobile reading — it is the one from Reat it Later.

Here is the full change log:

Enhancements

• Integration of “Read it Later” (http://readitlaterlist.com) mobilizer
• Hide subscription title per article in subscription’s article list
• Provide subscription settings in menu of subscription’s article list
• Reactivation of full screen view after 6 seconds
• Max number of title rows increased to 10

Im proud to announce that GoodNews 4.2.0 has been released at Google play! The most obvious features of 4.2.0 are the slide navigation and the full screen option in the article view. The slide navigation allows you to navigate among the articles of the current list by horizontal swiping gestures similar to the Google Mail app for ICS — the old navigation buttons are history now. The full scree view (see screenshot below) hides the action bar at the top and the playback bar, so that you get more room for reading. Tap somewhere in the article view to get the bars back for about three seconds. You will need the pro license (or activate the trial period) to use the full screen option.

Besides this I’ve integrated a few smaller enhancements and a view bug fixes. The most critical change is that GoodNews now again stores the article content in the file system instead of the database. This was the standard behavior in GoodNews 3, but there were very few users which had trouble with the amount of files generated by GoodNews why I’ve changed GoodNews 4 to store the content in the database. Unfortunately since release 4 a lot of people had performance and stability issues. Though I am not sure that this is related to the database storage, this is the only critical thing that has changed in GoodNews 4 and so I am reactivating the GoodNews 3 behavior now and hope that it will solve a lot of issues and bring less bad ratings at Google play! — GoodNews is currently in danger to get rated down to only 4 stars :-(

If your device has problems with the number of created files you can enforce database storage in GoodNews’ storage settings. Further on you will find the new storage statistics there which can help to perform some analysis in case of trouble.

Finally here is the full list of changes:

Enhancements

• Next/previous article in article view via horizontal swipe
• Full screen view in article view (requires pro license)
• Adjustable title text size in article list
• Fast orientation change in article view on Honeycomb and above
• Using native progress notification ICS and above
• New article notification shows total number of unread articles now
• Added storage statistics screen to storage settings
• Storing article content in file system by default

Fixes

• Fix endless sync loop introduced with 4.1.0
• Article list is correctly updated when changing read filter
• Several bug fixes.

Version 4.1.1 is the first release containing a new feature in the version 4 series. Besides fixing several minor bugs and a Android 1.6 compatibility issue, this release finally adjusts the continuous sync to work as most of you might expect it to right from the beginning. This includes that GoodNews handles

• reboots and
• connection losses

correctly.

In detail this means, that after a reboot and after a network connection is available GoodNews takes a look at the time of the last successful sync and the configured continuous sync interval and if a sync should have already occurred in the past, it will be triggered immediately, otherwise it will be correctly scheduled for the future. This does also imply, that it is no longer necessary to manually start GoodNews once after a reboot to make the continuous sync work — it will be triggered automatically now.

Further on I’ve given the sync service a lower priority to increase the responsiveness of the user interface when the sync is running in the background.

The new version is available at Google play.

In the past I’ve pub­lished some releases to the Android Mar­ket which con­tained errors I haven’t rec­og­nized either because I haven’t per­formed the actions that make the error occur or because the issue was spe­cific to a spe­cial android release or device.

To pre­vent these prob­lems last summer I’ve introduced the Good­News beta pro­gram. You as a user can sub­scribe to the program and will then have access to the latest releases. I encour­age you to check the new fea­tures and so hope to get feed­back about crit­i­cal errors before the ver­sion is finally released to Google play.

Now the GoodNews beta program has it’s own website in the context of the web relaunch. There you will find further information and — that is new — you will also have access to the latest beta releases even without subscribing. If you want to subscribe you can now choose between the classical e-mail subscription or a simple news feed subscription using your preferred news reader.

And the best: The first beta release is already waiting for you. Happy testing!

Bring me to the GoodNews beta Program

Do you already know the new GoodNews website? It has been launched last week together with GoodNews 4 and brings a completely new appealing look and feel. And you will like the feature, that it provides a slick and thin mobile view when opening it in your phone’s browser. We will continuously update the documentation section to provide useful information, tips and tricks to you.

Also the old user forum has been replaced with a modern feedback and support platform. There you can submit support requests, requests for new features and you can vote for new features. So I can concentrate in my rare spare time on the issues which are most important to you. Does this mean that I will always implement the features with the highest votes? No, I still have a roadmap with some important issues on it. But for the rest the votes will give me an important indicator of what to do next.

After more than four months of development I am really proud to present GoodNews 4. The highlight of the new release is definitely the new ICS-like look and feel which especially looks great on all android 4 devices, but also brings a fresh look and feel to your older android. This goes hand in hand with the new additional brightness themes (including black and dark theme) available to every one who owns the paid license. Further on I’ve introduced teasers in article lists, offline image support (thanks to Tor Pedersen for his implementation), lock screen playback controls (requires android 4) and so much more.

The new release is available on Google play with immediate effect, same as the new Pro License which replaces the old ad-free license — but don’t fear: If you’ve purchased the ad-free license before you will be automatically updated to the pro license — no need for a new purchase.

Due to the number of changes I needed to drop android 1.5 support, so that you will need a device with at least android 1.6 to use GoodNews 4. If you are the sad owner of a 1.5 device you will still be able to install GoodNews from the market, but you will receive the older version 3.

I also would like to thank all the beta testers for their patients and their helpful feedback during the seven beta releases.

Enough now — here is the full change list…

Enhancements

News Reading

• Teaser in article list.
• Support for offline images.
• Displaying labels in article list.
• Enable diagonal scrolling in article view on Android 2 and above.
• Browse back button in article view.
• Customizable action bar in article view.
• Customizable action when clicking the article title in the article view.

Podcasts

• Supporting lock screen playback control on Android 4 and above.
• Highlight of last played episode in the article list.
• Skip button on secondary playback bar.
• Playlist always contains a playback bar for the most recently listened/next episode.
• Option to add play list shortcut to home screen.
• Remember approximate playback position even when killed.
• Pause and resume using status bar.
• Global option to automatically add new episodes to play list.
• Option to mark finished episodes as read.
• Migration tip for users coming from Google Listen.

Generic

• Complete new, ICS like look and feel.
• Introduced light, dark and black theme (requires the paid license).
• Menu option in article list to fetch old (read) articles from Google Reader.
• New action bar.
• Using native menu on Android 3 and above.
• More comfortable share action on Android 4 and above.
• Permanent display of scroll bars in all list views.
• Two-pane view for settings on tablets >= Android 3.
• Icons for main categories in settings.
• Cloud backup of all settings on devices with market access and Android 2.2 or above.
• User interface settings have been split up into view specific settings.
• Storing article content in database instead of file system to prevent out of inode problem.
• Extreme acceleration of the list view when using thousands of articles.
• Incredible fast marking read using the tick button.
• Overworked usage tips.
• Several minor enhancements.

Fixes

• Headset button fixes for Galaxy Nexus and several others.
• Fixed podcast size “-0″ issue.
• Fixed hang when using mark read on scroll over option.
• Several other fixes.