Most of the time when we release a new feature, it finds immediate use. But every so often a new feature comes along that changes how NewsBlur gets used. I consider offline stories part of this exclusive club. Same with the Text view, which shows you the full text of a story. And push notifications are right up there.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new Today View widget on iOS.

Instead of having to open up the app to see what’s new, the stories come to you in the Today View, adjacent to the notification center. Personally I find myself checking this Today View widget a dozen times more than I open the NewsBlur app. It’s so incredibly useful to have NewsBlur come to me.

Additionally, in version 10.0 of the iOS app, we have a bunch of new features:

  • A new iOS widget shows the latest stories in your Notification Center and on your iPad dashboard
  • Statistics visualization for every site
  • Automatic downloading of the original story full text for offline reading
  • Unsubscribe from a feed directly from a story
  • Preferences import & export

And tons of bugs were fixed along with other small improvements:

  • Fixed crash on start for a few users
  • Fixed highlighting issue
  • Fixed settings with stories on bottom
  • Tweaked dark theme colors to be darker
  • Fixed wonky behavior on iPad
  • Clearing offline now clears the cached stories, text, and images from the database
  • Manually changing the theme now turns off the preference to follow the system appearance
  • Turning on following the system appearance immediately updates the theme appropriately
  • Fixed crash on feed load list
  • Fixed crash on start

And if you’re an Android user, I just want you to know that we intended to ship this feature first on Android (and in fact, it is 90% built) but then our Android developer bailed. I’ll be hiring for another Android devleoper soon, but if that interests you, please reach out!