Feed Hawk 1.5 is now available in the App Store. This update delivers three big sets of changes:
- Feed discovery improvements
- Support for JSON Feed
- Better success and error notifications
Feed Discovery Improvements
Most sites link to their feeds from pages that are part of the site’s blog. Many do not link to those feeds from pages that are not part of the site’s blog. With this update, Feed Hawk will now look for a blog page and search that page for feeds if it does not find a feed on the current page. If you are visiting foo.com, Feed Hawk will look for a page at blog.foo.com and at foo.com/blog/. It will also look for links to a blog on the page you are visiting.
In addition Feed Hawk will now find the relevant blog feed, author feed, and tag feeds for any page hosted by Medium. Medium publishes these feeds but Medium pages generally only link to one feed or to no feeds at all. Feed Hawk now detects whether a page is served by Medium even if it does not have a medium.com URL. If the page is served by Medium, Feed Hawk will use its knowledge of where Medium feeds are located.
Support for JSON Feed
JSON Feed is a new feed format written by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons. If you are using a feed service that supports JSON Feed (Feedbin, Inoreader, or NewsBlur), Feed Hawk now discovers and allows you to subscribe to JSON Feeds.
Because JSON Feed is so new, most sites that publish JSON Feeds also publish RSS or Atom feed equivalents. Showing customers a list of feeds where some are essentially duplicates of others would make for a poor user experience. Therefore Feed Hawk will hide RSS and Atom feeds for the page if there are also JSON Feeds and you are not subscribed to any of the RSS or Atom feeds. It will hide the JSON Feeds if you are already subscribed to at least one of the RSS or Atom feeds and not to any of the JSON Feeds.
Better Success and Error Notifications
If you tap on the screen while Feed Hawk is displaying a confirmation message, Feed Hawk will now immediately dismiss that confirmation message. Feed Hawk now displays error messages in traditional alerts instead of in HUD windows.
If you enjoy using Feed Hawk or if you like these improvements, please consider leaving a review in the App Store.
