News on Resco Neeews!

Resco just sent us an exclusive beta of Resco Neeews! – the RSS reader for Palm OS. As we already stated some time ago in our on-site report series at Resco’s, Neews! will eventually become a commercial version.

The product has essentially gone golden a few minutes ago and will be released very soon(less than 3 days…delaying Daily Quote 2 to Friday). I have the feature list for you now, a little review of the golden beta will be online in a few hours:

News in v 2.01

GUI
Better Html rendering
HiRes support, incl. landscape
View modes: By Icon / By List
Four font sizes
Selectable scroll step
New Icon Manager: Currently supports icon import from Zlauncher icon sets.

New shortcuts
Space = Toggle focus Title – Article
Treo 680/700p: Green button opens context menu
‘m’ – open context menu (also green button on T700p/T680)
‘r’ – set article unread
‘b’ – open article in browser
‘v’ – toggle article favorite

Improved Newspaper wizard
– Simplified
– Direct access to premium services (see below)
– Optional sorting of articles by date
The difference is with multi-feed newspapers. Default sort order is 1.
feed, 2. date.
However, the user may request sorting by date only. (Mixing articles from different feeds.)
– Modifying the order of newspaper feeds

Web connectivity
– Offline mode: Prevents unwanted auto-download. (Eg. images, when the last update was interrupted.)
– Disconnect command
– ‘Disconnect on Exit’ option (General Options)
– Support for https protocol (Probably works on newer devices only; eg. T5 might fail.)

Asynchroneous update
Here is what can you do while the newspaper update is in progress:
– Start reading updated newspaper immediately after the text of the first feed was downloaded.
(The download continues on background.)
– Read other newspapers.
– Start update of another newspaper. (The updates are queued.)

Background update
– Improved Error Log
– Display dimming
– Global option to switch off background updates (General Options)
– Auto-connect dialogs are dismissed after 30 secs if possible.
(Heuristical procedure mostly – if not always -
successful. The purpose is to prevent phone blocking by unsuccessful connection attempt.)

External Tools
Selectable viewer: Resco Viewer, Acid Image, SplashPhoto, GRX Selectable player: AeroPlayer, Kinoma, mmPlayer, mOcean, PocketTunes, TCPMP
Plus built-in audio-player (available on newest Palm models) Web browser is not selectable. Following browser are supported in the order of preference:
1. Blazer 3.0/4.0
2. NetFront
3. Novarra WebPro
4. PalmSource Web Browser/NetFront 2.0

Memory requirements
ArticleDB applies compression on larger articles, which brings savings around 25%.
(More on blogs with larger articles.)
User has control over the setup of the ArticleDB. In an extreme case – if the user does not need features such as Favorites, Send… (i.e. the user works primarily with generated newspapers) – it is possible to run with very low memory consumption.

Premium Services
Support for so-called ‘dynamic feeds’:
– Google News
– Windows Live Search (former MSN search)
– Newsvine
– Reddit
– Technorati
– del.icio.us
– Flickr
Bloglines account synchronization (more exactly: feed list synchronization) Improved feed search

Other changes
– Article read status added
– Image Cache dialog enables to control card space reserved to images.
– Improved rss support
– New command: SMS article
– New command: Export article to memo

This looks like a great new Palm OS program – what do you think?

Related posts:

1. Resco Neeews!
2. Resco Neeews! – the (p)review
3. Resco Neeews updated
4. Resco News updated to version 2.40
5. Smaato News review