FeedViewer is an HTML viewer for Android devices, optimized for offline reading of RSS feeds such as news sites, blogs and science sites.
I wrote about what it's for and my motivation for developing it in: Android tablet as an ebook/RSS reader. To some extent, it's a replacement for Plucker on PalmOS.
This is my first Android app, so be gentle.
It's free and open source (licensed under the GNU Public License version 2 or, at your option, any later version).
The first release of the source code is here: FeedViewer-2011-09-12.tar.gz or you can download the latest binary here: FeedViewer-2011-09-12.apk
FeedViewer is not currently available in the Android marketplace or on any other Android sites, mostly because I'm brand new to this and haven't looked into how that all works. That's also why I don't have one of those nifty barcode things (besides, my Archos doesn't have a camera so I couldn't test them anyway).
To scroll down or up, long-press near the bottom or top of the screen. Of course, normal Android fling-scrolling also works.
Dragging along the left edge of the screen will adjust the screen brightness. (It also scrolls at the same time; I haven't figured out a way to disable the scrolling, sorry.)
<< and >> go back and forward like a browser (flinging left and right also work). On Android 1.6, at least, it's fairly inconsistent where you'll end up, but that seems to be a bug in Android's WebView (I hope it's better in later versions).
Feeds shows the overview of all the feeds you have available to read; ToC goes to the table of contents for the current feed.
The Scroll menu scrolls approximately to the top, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% or bottom of the document. This isn't very accurate yet.
To adjust font size, use the menu button to make the font smaller or larger.
FeedViewer looks for directories named "feeds" on the android's storage
and/or on its SD card.
I've only tested it on one device, my Archos 5 running Android 1.6.
I think Archos may mount the filesystem in a nonstandard place.
If you try FeedViewer and it can't see your feeds, let me know
where your device mounts them and I'll add it to the search list.
Any directory inside "feeds" is taken to be a specific site and day, and FeedViewer will look for an index page named index.html inside that.
For instance, if feeds/12-19-Sun/ contains BBC_News_Science/, Slate/ and The_Register/, FeedViewer's top-level "Feeds" page will show something like:
/storage/feeds/12-19-Sun feeds:
12-19-Sun BBC_News_Science
12-19-Sun Slate
12-19-Sun The Register
Each of those individual feeds is a link, so click on the Slate line to read today's new Slate stories.
Here's how I use FeedViewer each day. Of course, you may invent other models.
cp -r ~/feeds/12-19-Sun /androidsd/
find ~/feeds -ctime +6 -exec rm "{}" \;
Once you're in the reader, Feeds goes to the index page, ToC goes to the index page for the current feed, the << and >> buttons go back and forward (horizontal swipes do that too), a long press at the bottom or top of the screen pages down or up (or you can scroll with vertical swipes).
Android's WebView defaults to a white background and black text. They let you change the white background to something else, but you can't change the text color, so if you want light-on-dark default colors (like "Night mode" in Aldiko), you're out of luck.
But of course individual web pages can use any colors they want. So here's what I do: in FeedMe, when I download HTML pages, I add a stylesheet at the beginning of each page that looks like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="Feeds" href="../../feeds.css"/>
Then feeds.css contains something like this:
body {
color: white;
background: #011;
}
a:link { color: #ffff00; }
a:visited { color: #aaffaa; }
a:hover, a:active { color: #ffffaa; }
These should probably have !important at the ends,
since occasionally you hit portions of a page where the text reverts
to black and you can't read it. I need to experiment more.
Eventually I'll probably add controls to FeedViewer so you can change the colors interactively (by writing to feeds.css), but right now I'm the only user (as far as I know) so it hasn't been a priority.