SPB Updates Insight - Adds Today Plugin!

[Jon Westfall]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/insight/?en' target='_blank'>http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/pro...cts/insight/?en</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Spb Software House, the leading Windows Mobile software developer, releases Spb Insight 1.5, a long-awaited update to the innovative news reading application. Spb Insight is a Pocket PC news reader, which provides full-text articles with pictures for handy and fast offline reading. This version provides even smoother and richer news reading experience by introducing the Today plug-in with two viewing modes and article thumbnails, new faster data storage system and many other improvements."</i><br /><br /><img src=http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/westfall-insightheader1.jpg><br /><br />Back in October when <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,51726">I reviewed SPB Insight</a>, I mentioned that a today plugin would be nice. And lo and behold, my request (and I'm sure that of others) has been answered in SPB Insight 1.5! Add in Insight's unique ability to give you full text articles ready for offline reading, and Insight 1.5 looks like a real player in the RSS reader / offline reader area!

[silkshadow]

I wish mobile news sites wouldn't call what this program and all the others besides egress, avantgo and mobipocket do "full text articles ready for offline reading" or "offline full text" or whatever. That's absoloute BS and misleading to boot. Most quality news sites are not tiny semi-articles like thoughts and endgadget. They actually have full articles and none of these newsreaders get that "full text" article for "offline reading".

[Alexander Shtuchkin]

silkshadow, I'm a bit surprised to hear that about Spb Insight. This program was from the beginning designed to load real full-text articles from web sites. Not only to load and show, like egress or others do, but also to clean them up from unneeded menus and optimize for small screen reading.
Almost all of the channels in our online catalog do show you full articles and there more than 10'000 (!) channels in it, submitted by Spb Insight enthusiasts.
I'm not sure if you were mislead by our support for all RSS/Atom type channels? These channels indeed provide only a fraction of article full text, and we support them to give a chance to read a channel if it's not in the online catalog.
Remember, Spb Insight is much more than a usual RSS reader. Maybe it was not so popular earlier because of problems with speed, but version 1.5 is really worth a look because all major problems were fixed.

Thanks!
Alexander Shtuchkin,
Spb Insight PM.

[Jason Lee]

I wish mobile news sites wouldn't call what this program and all the others besides egress, avantgo and mobipocket do "full text articles ready for offline reading" or "offline full text" or whatever. That's absoloute BS and misleading to boot. Most quality news sites are not tiny semi-articles like thoughts and endgadget. They actually have full articles and none of these newsreaders get that "full text" article for "offline reading".

Perhaps you should actually try the program before judging it.

As Alexander said it is much more than a simple RSS reader. Insight uses templates (written in java script) to parse full web pages, downloads them to your device, and formats them for your screen. So these "channels" are not just simple rss feeds but the full text and photos from the article. Although it happens to support RSS is just an added bonus. :)

I had uninstalled 1.0 because it was just way too slow for me. 1.5 is a HUGE improvement over 1.0. Nice work Spb. Good update.

[floepie]

Nice app. What seems to be the appeal of the today plugin? Who is going to stare at the today screen and wait for news that you feel like reading? If I'm going to read the news, I'll open the app, right? I'm just curious why others find this feature an added bonus?

FWIW, I still cannot get to the very bottom link within an article before I'm swooshed off to the next article in the channel without pulling out the stylus. I'll cite Engadget here as a prime example.

[Jason Lee]

Nice app. What seems to be the appeal of the today plugin? Who is going to stare at the today screen and wait for news that you feel like reading? If I'm going to read the news, I'll open the app, right? I'm just curious why others find this feature an added bonus?

FWIW, I still cannot get to the very bottom link within an article before I'm swooshed off to the next article in the channel without pulling out the stylus. I'll cite Engadget here as a prime example.

hehe i am with you on the today plugin.. I never really understood why RSS readers need today plugins. I will play with the today pluging for a while and then disable it. It might be more useful if it were to indicate how many unread news items you have.

I have the same issue with the link at the bottom of the article.. :( I just have to hit it with my thumb.

[Fedorov]

I had no problems with v1.0 other than the overall speed of updates - v1.5 is a very impressive update, great speed increase - great job guys!

[mattbugz]

Still no scheduled updates. :(

[myrampar]

I had uninstalled the first version because it was too slow and tried Newbreak instead. I really like Newsbreak.

After hearing about the new version of Insight, I downloaded it and reinstalled it to my storage card. I them imported my channel data from Newsbreak.

It is still as slow as it was before for me. I have about 20 channels in all (PPC Thoughts, Digital Media Thoughts and Smartphone Thoughts of course :D ) but when choosing 'Update all' from the menu, it seems to update the first 3 or 4 ok and then the progress bar stops. It doesn't matter if I am using EVDO or Wifi. I don't have this issue with Newsbreak and it is running from the storage card also.

I also have a question about 'full-text articles'. Maybe all of my feeds are simple RSS feeds, but just about all of the articles I read in Newsbreak and Insight have the same look. Some appear to have the full article while others are cut off after a few sentences and I need to click the link to finish the article online. Does anyone know if Newsbreak also downloads full-text articles? Can anyone give me a channel to add to both that shows this difference between the 2 programs?

I also really like the ability to automatically or manually download podcasts with Newsbreak.

Anyone with some 'Insight' on my issues? Sorry, couldn't resist! :wink:

[Jason Lee]

I also have a question about 'full-text articles'. Maybe all of my feeds are simple RSS feeds, but just about all of the articles I read in Newsbreak and Insight have the same look. Some appear to have the full article while others are cut off after a few sentences and I need to click the link to finish the article online. Does anyone know if Newsbreak also downloads full-text articles? Can anyone give me a channel to add to both that shows this difference between the 2 programs?

If you simply imported your feeds from news break you are only getting the normal RSS feeds. To get the full text channels you need to add a new item.
Click the new button, choose "Online catalog", hit next. Browse through the catalog an find the channels you want and hit finish. Hint: the items with the blue icon are full text channels. the orange icons are plain old RSS feeds.

[myrampar]

Jason-

Thanks for the reply! I'll give that a try with a few channels and do a visual comparison between Insight and Newsbreak.

Cheers!

[myrampar]

Well, I just tried to add a new Channel by choosing New-->Online catalog-->and clicking next.

I get this error message. Error: Bad status code: 503.

I've closed the program completely (I have Spb Pocket Plus) and tried it a few more times but I get the same result. I've verified that my EVDO connection is working as I can browse the web.

I guess I'll keep trying.

[Jason Lee]

I had that error a few times. For me just trying again worked... hmm.

[silkshadow]

Perhaps you should actually try the program before judging it.

Try the program? Don't be a moron. I ran it for the full trial period. Alongside A6, newsbreak, and egress. I also ran a few of the open source and freeware programs that were all poor and quickly got removed.

If you simply imported your feeds from news break you are only getting the normal RSS feeds. To get the full text channels you need to add a new item.
Click the new button, choose "Online catalog", hit next. Browse through the catalog an find the channels you want and hit finish. Hint: the items with the blue icon are full text channels. the orange icons are plain old RSS feeds.

Before attacking me, maybe you should consider your own words (and ignorance)? How is this full-text RSS? These are customized "channels" made by SPB. I use maybe 3 of those sites (yes out of the 10k or whatever). The rest of my feeds are not in this "online catalog". Just to be clear, let me repost your own words again, so maybe I am clearer (equivilent of speaking slowly and using small words):

you are only getting the normal RSS feeds.
the orange icons are plain old RSS feeds.

Yeah, a "normal RSS feed" or "plain old RSS feeds" and SPB Insight supports "full-text" RSS feeds?! No, they do not support offline full text RSS feeds. They support full text on certain news sites that they have configured for SPB Insight. They do not support full-text, offline viewing of RSS feeds. Or to put it simpler for you, they do not support full text offline for any valid RSS feed I put in. None of them do besides the ones I excepted.

Jason, RSS is an open spec so that anyone can read it. Articles that news RSS feeds point to are HTML, also an open spec. More info on RSS, as you certainly need it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss). Do you need a definiton on HTML? Or open spec? So support of full text offline viewing of RSS means I should be able to put any RSS url in there and it will get the full article. Now do you get it? So, you want to ask me again if I posted without trying the app first? Did you read my post before attacking me? I, at least, did you the courtesy of reading yours.

@Alexander Shtuchkin I am very sorry. I do not want to make this about SPB. I actually like SPB. I own a few of your programs (actually games) and have generally nothing but good things to say about you and your support and everything. Though, you guys need to add more support for trueVGA like SBSH does. ;) I wanted to comment on this fallicy by mobile new sites who call programs like this full text offline RSS support. Jason Lee, made it about SPB when he felt he needed to attack me as an ignorant poster.

I would encourage you to consider making SPB insight so it can do what, for example, Mobipocket does. It can read any RSS feed and follow the links to fetch the entire article (and it supports my langage encodings). Egress does this but it forces you to use your web browser to read the news, which I do not like. If you can do the same but allow me to read the full article in the Insight GUI, I'd buy your app in a second (and if it supports my font encodings). Mobipocket does not have the ability to update feeds on the device. Its why I was demoing all the RSS apps.

Your catalog system is flawed because it caters to a very specific markets, that being North America and Western Europe. I live in Asia and we are massive WM consumers here (not to mention we make and design almost every WM device on the planet). Our feeds, however, will never be in any online catalog you create because you do not read the same sights we do. In turn, because you do not support the feeds we read, we will not use your program and make the effort to contribute more feeds to your system. We also tend not to like closed systems. You need to embrace an open system where a user can put in any normal rss feed and it will do its thing, like mobipocket or egress does.

[Jason Lee]

Thank you for your "contribution" to the community, silkshadow.

My post was not intended to be an attack, as yours obviously was, and thank you for the link but I am well aware of what RSS, HTML, and "open spec" mean.

I did read your post. Other wise I would not have replied to it. It is rather difficult to form a reply without reading first what you are replying to. ;)
No where in any post do i see any one say that Insight supports "full-text RSS" besides your post. Insight supports full-text articles _and_ RSS. They are not the same thing as you have so eloquently pointed out. However I think Spb needs to make a better distinction between which items are RSS and which are "full-text" articles. That is the biggest problem I see users having. They install insight and choose their favorite feeds from the list or import their OPML file then can't understand why they are not getting the full text on some of them yet are on others. Spb is _not_ clear on these differences. I think that is a big mistake, not intended to be misleading but a mistake none the less.

I agree with you in that I do not like the template idea either. That is why none of my items in insight are "channels". They are all RSS feeds. I don't like the idea of having to depend on someone else to make sure these templates are up-to-date when i can always rely on the RSS feed to work. There have been plenty of examples of templates breaking when the real website changes the format of their page over in the insight support forums. I don't like the idea and I will not use it.
Besides I am also in the same boat you are... Even if I wanted to use the "channels" there are very few of my usual RSS feed list that have a channel and I am no where near motivated enough to write my own. :lol:

Since you were nice enough to provide me with such a helpful link I searched the internet for a few that you might find useful in the future:

http://www.angermgmt.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette


Either way I have since uninstalled insight and gone back to pRSSreader (http://pda.jasnapaka.com/prssr/) for one reason. pRSSreader allows me to sort and group my channels so I can read only "News" or "Pocket PC" feeds. It also allows me to update a group of feeds instead of all or just one at a time. Oh, and it supports podcasts. (ok so a few reasons)
My RSS needs are simple. I do like many things about insight but i will never use it for anything more than a simple RSS reader. I believe that when these features are added it will be better than pRSSreader mostly because it renders the feeds better but I will not use it for the channels.

[rookcnu]

Does it bother anyone else in the community that a "pocket pc neophyte" (only 3 posts) can act like this on the forum? Especially toward a "pocket pc pontificator",... someone which I have looked at as a major contributor to this forum since I have been here and that definitely deserves a bit more respect than he is receiving.

There is nothing in Jason Lee's post that indicates that he is being an a#@. The other poster on the other hand,.....

[Fedorov]

Quite funny really - I suggest we stop feeding the trolls now though ;)

[bigkingfun]

Does it bother anyone else in the community that a "pocket pc neophyte" (only 3 posts) can act like this on the forum? Especially toward a "pocket pc pontificator",... someone which I have looked at as a major contributor to this forum since I have been here and that definitely deserves a bit more respect than he is receiving.

There is nothing in Jason Lee's post that indicates that he is being an a#@. The other poster on the other hand,.....

It never ceases to amaze me how people will act when afforded the relative anonymity of the internet. Face to face, I highly doubt the response would have been the same.

[psyjohn]

I've been trying out Insight and Newsbreak lately, and unless I'm missing something I don't see how the two really compare. Newsbreak appears to be nothing more than a basic RSS reader with features comparable to several good freeware apps. While Insight can be used to read RSS feeds, there is an impressive number of channels to choose from. All of those channels offer full articles offline (many with images). If I am missing some important aspect of Newsbreak, please let me know, but right now I'm amazed that the two apps are sold for the same price.

John