Protidin @ Android

Version 1.0.3.2

2010-06-01T22:49:00.001-04:00

I have added a toolbar in Feedview screen ( Mark All Read & Exit , Back , Trim Database Size) this will save your one click
For Trim Feature - do go to preference and set number of days . So when you click on this it will delete all the records X days old data.

Protidin now Supports RSS and ATOM feed.

2010-05-22T01:29:00.000-04:00

Till now protidin was only supporting RSS feed . But with more requests comming in - now its going to support both RSS and ATOM feed.

Last couple of days i have been testing performance of both types of feeds , I will not say it's awesome but it's good. Most of the feeds did quite well and parsing was ok.

However i noticed few problems like when feeds items exceeds more than 50 then occassionaly there were memory issue - as of now this problem exists in future i am going to address this too...

i will be releasing this new version soon.

Version 1.0.2

2010-05-05T22:14:00.000-04:00

* Added Louisiana newspapers
* Fix sorting order
* Increased the size of favourites to 15

New Release - com.pluto.protidin

2010-05-01T22:00:00.001-04:00

Well i could not recall the lost password !! So again i have to release this as a new app. The new app features your favourites - news paper , channels and news .

Also now you can browse news from Australia , France , Cananda , US , Great Britain , India.

This is how your favourite channels screen looks . Now you can click on refresh and let the background process downloads all the news.

3:30 AM - Lost password !!! - In short Screwed

2010-04-27T03:53:00.001-04:00

Well it's 3:30 AM , and i can not recover password for my keystore file . I am lost - in short screwed . there is no way i can recover the password the keystore file. So i can never upgrade the application the ony way is now to release a new app . This is the last thing i wanted to do.

Read more

i wanted to release a new feature of adding fav channels but seems i am lost now - depressed !!! thought of trying a recovery tool but seems like it is trojan - so i need to clean that up tooo.......

well this is life ....!!!

Newspapers Feeds ( Protidin ) 1.0

2010-04-09T23:46:00.001-04:00

Here is the new logo and new look of Protidin - Newspapers Feed Reader . You can search the app in Android Market by Newspapers Feeds - (Protidin) or by package name com.jyoti.protidin the only reason why i need to create a new app is because of new package name - i have learnt it hard way.

So what does the new app offers you ??

Well in home screen now you can have your Favourite Country - All newspapers and your favourties news . I did not like the Android Tabs - So I tried similar things but with button some thing which is similar to market

below is the screen where in you can easily locate the news paper and then you can select the country / category and then add this to your favourite ( remember the Long Press on News Paper )

Here is the Preference Screen - through you can control the Browser , Google Mobilizer ( read more about Mobilier here ) , News description on or off , Text Size and your Size of Favourites

Below is the Screen which let's you select your preferred country at home screen

This is how you can add a Favourite newspaper

This is how you can remove your news papers form favourite

This is how you can download the news from the channel - do not forget the Long Press

Menu options for Feedback and Delete news from all channels

At last your feeds - news now you can mark them as your favourites - to reload click on refresh

on long press on the news Feed item this all menus items are available - Mark Read , Mark Unread , View in Browser with/without mobilizer , Add comment

Finally your news in detail in webpage

I am always trying to improve the application , so any feedback , any suggestions good or bad is always welcome and please do rate the application in android market .

you can reach me at dekajp@gmail.com

Protidin 1.3.1

2010-02-24T20:35:00.000-05:00

Well this time it was tough , because i left one nice feature to accomodate other
1) When you select a item the borders are changed
2) Now internal Feed routine can identify the Encoding of Feed , this will reduce Feed parsing error .
When i ran a test program i could parse all channels except for 1 out of 300(approx) i.e Times of India / Tech
3) I have introduced a date routine which can parse all types of dates (Little heavy in memory and speed) except for two News House ( The Hindu ,The Telegraph) But if you find more do let me know.
4) I have also updated minor UI changes like progress bar and all.
5) if zoom feature is not working use TextSize from menu to change textsize in browser window.
6) I have added Popular Blogs of India and US

Well to acheive all what i said above - i left the images in the Home Screen to save some memory.

The parsing routine is important because all future enhancements are based on that. Also I changed the application icon i got it from http://narayankamath.com/blog/?p=63
I have sent a thanking note to the developer of the icon.

Version 1.3 - minor patch

2010-02-15T01:46:00.000-05:00

today morning I got a request to add a feature of Back and Home button in Browser Screen and immediately i realized this is a cool feature ...So here it is
Using Back swtich user can directly go to Feed view Screen or Channel View Screen depends upon from where user came to browser screen
Home menu swtich will take user directly to the home screen

Version 1.3

2010-02-13T01:10:00.000-05:00

I released version 1.3 , in this version i have added canada , US and UK news sources so in total currently the application is providing news from 31 channels and more than 200 feeds.

As soon as i uploaded it i realised Screen orientation defect in Feed view Screen . ooooh... i will try to fix that soon !!!!

* Screen Orientation defect is fixed.

Protidin Version 1.2

2010-01-26T06:26:00.000-05:00

I Released 1.2 Version last sunday - Well here are few Enhancements

1) More News Channels
2) Quick Load Time ( Loading of Home page is pretty fast ) now I load the home page in Main Thread instead of background thread
3) News channels are arranged in Alphabetical Order
4) Added Popular US Mobile News Websites

I realised there are still couple of Issues - the main is the Memory Mgmt. The applicaiton is crashing whenever user tries to do multitasking . I will soon publish a new udpate of the applicaiton to fix this problem.

Download the Latest Version (1.2) from FileSwap Protidin_signed_zip.apk - 210.82 KB

Protidin Version 1.1

2010-01-06T21:38:00.000-05:00

I have added few more news houses and menu options in the Home Page. Also now you can share the News Link via Tweeter / facebook / eMail ...

Soon i will be uploading the Last Version of India- News Reader which will have a banner requesting existing users to move to Protidin.

I am sorry for the inconvenience caused by this transition - and sorry for my "narrow" approach.

Please do let me know about Protidin - How can i improve this application or what all you would like to read ? or anything

Download Latest Version
Protidin_signed_zip.apk - 138.67 KB

Protidin - Version 1.0

2009-12-26T22:57:00.000-05:00

Finally I rewrote the Android app India-news-Times Of India . Actually there were couple of problems with the design and layout of the original code .

What made me to wrote is - good demand of the app 500 downloads in a month , It's not huge demand but Ok or Enough to motivate me to write it again .

I was thinking about the name of the application i came up with Pratidin - means Everyday ( in most of indian languages ) But then there more of Ooo than Aaa in Assamese / Bengali Languages so i choose Protidin instead Pratidin - Needless to say I love both the languages

Again the application tries to be very simple and straight forward - It provides only Main Feeds and Mobile Portal of the Media/News house. If everything goes well , in future I would be happy to add more features like sharing , tweeting or adding favorites

Here is how it looks , below is the home page

On clicking on the above News House , it opens all available channels and mobile portal of the news house

On selecting any of the news channels (Feed) , the Feed is downloaded from the server and displayed in a List format

For more details on selecting the News Segment , it downloads the details from the web

On Selecting the Mobile Portal Application redirects to the Main Mobile Portal of the News Media House

How to clear cache of Android Applications

2009-12-05T00:17:00.000-05:00

How to check the cache size of any android application ? Well it's very easy

1) Click on Setting

2) Then , Click on Applications

3) Then , Click on Manage Application

4) You will see the list of applications , Select the application of which you want to clear the cache . Click on the application

5) Then ,Click on clear cache

India - News Reader Version 5.2

2009-12-04T23:54:00.000-05:00

I went through all feedback and the first thing in my mind came is to change the the UI color (Look and Feel) . So i did that changed layout and color combination , and also i did a quick fix - after the news is downloaded i maintain a cache . so if user click on news segment and goes to browser and comes back - the news is loaded from cache.

Also i added couple of financial news channels , here are complete list of channels
Times of India , Ibn Live , Economic Times , CNBC MoneyControl , Indian Express , Financial express , Pakistan - Jang

Times of India now in G1 / Android

2009-11-23T22:29:00.000-05:00

I got a new G1 few months back - TMobile phone , G1 Phone as most of you know runs on Android . I joined a new office in Philadelphia / PA , the travel time from home to office was about around 40 mins . I used to browse news about India ( TOI , Ibn Live , Economic Times ) soon I realize that I need something different which is easy and light weight application .

Well there were lot of applications, but either all of them were focused on US or they were not FREE or May be I did not find them :)

So I thought of writing application, in android.
So I went through Android Dev Guide and Working with XML in Android (excellent article ) As most of my work is based on XML , the core logic is to read RSS Feed from news website and display them. I do not do any caching as of now. I do use some threading, preference i become greedy as i moved from version 1 to 4

Well at first I thought I just need Times of India (http://www.timesofindia.com/)

So I created my first basic application and published in market 10th Nov. India-news-Times Of India
Well so far I have released 4 , between 2-3 version I wished more.., I added Times Of India , IBN – Live , Economic Times and Pakistan Jang News feed.

But I screwed up something between Version 2 and 3 (which I have not figured out so far !!) When you try to upgrade from version 2 to 3 , the installation will be unsuccessful - reason : Package file not signed properly . Well to resolve this first uninstall the application and then Install it again . To search the application in Android market use keyword "india"

Well then I detected when you turn your phone the screen goes blank – that’s ugly .

So I put – a quick and dirty fix and released version 4 .

Outlook and Time Zones

2008-06-18T05:13:00.000-04:00

This is my first blog in internet .

I have been working in software industry since 2002 ,Bangalore. Many times i had to arrange a meeting with clients who are operating on different time zone .

I was looking for quick tool , one of my colleague showed me about a poweful feature of outlook.

Go to Outlook >> Click on Calendar >> Right Click on the Time Line (Left Bar) >> Click Change Time Zone >>Check the Box ( Show an additional Time Zone)

Now you can have 2 Timezones in Outlook calendar this comes very handy sometimes.