Category Archives: Stream

Easy to Discover Feeds

Stream

If you’d like to help feed readers like Stream auto discover your RSS feed you can do it by including a very simple line of HTML in the <head> element of your web page.

Here’s what it looks like for Scripting News the weblog of the man who created RSS, Dave Winer.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://scripting.com/rss.xml">

That’s it, that’s all it takes! Stream can now look through your home webpage, or blog main page, and ask for this element. Once it discovers it it will go right to that spot and allow you to subscribe.

Just like magic! 🪄

Stream 1.3

Stream, ,

I’m happy to announce a new Stream release. Version 1.3 is a minor release with one new feature and two bug fixes.

New Feature 💫

When you go to Settings you’ll notice a new section called CACHE. This feature allows you to set the number of days to maintain Feed Items in the timeline. It’s a sliding scale between 1 and 30. The original release of Stream, and every version since, has used a hard code value of 30. Now you can control how long you hold onto feed items.

Thanks to Steven Vore for the feature suggestion.

Bug Fixes 🐞

  • Timeline list items with long titles could force the date to display off the screen. Thank you Iryna for your layout mastery and support.
  • Images in the Article view that were small than the width of the screen were blown up to fill the screen. Thank you Ashur for your HTML and CSS mastery and your continued support.

I hope you enjoy this release and find Stream a valuable part of your Feed Reading workflow. 🧡

Who is Hayseed?

Business, Development, Indie, RxCalc, Stream

Hayseed is a one person shop, run by me, Rob Fahrni.

I’ve registered a few domains over the years with the thought of starting an Indie development shop.

The first was Pneumatic Industries. At that time in my life I was a hardcore Windows developer working on a product called Visio. My ideas then centered around the creation of a Windows API/C++ application that could track pesticide use for farmers and Pest Control Advisors. This desire was derived from my years of working on Ag products at AgData. Way down the road I’d work for a little company called Agrian that would deliver everything I could have dreamed of and a whole lot more.

My next venture was Apple Core Labs. I started it to develop iOS Apps for myself and others. The fruits of that effort were the creation of RxCalc (please forgive the outdated site) and Arrgly.

I created RxCalc with my brother Jay so he could do Pharmacokinetics calculations at the hospital. Jay sat next to me and we wrote the math for the app in C++ because the original code was going to run on Palm PDA and Windows, which it did, I just never built the UI for it.

Enter the iPhone. When we saw that and Apple shipped an SDK for it I immediately set out to make an iPhone version. The C++ came over no problem, the UI took me forever to build. On July 4, 2009, RxCalc made it debut in the App Store. It’s been there ever since.

I did a bunch of contract iOS work under that moniker, I don’t think any of it exists today, which is a real shame.

Ultimately I failed to make consulting work for me. Too much time away from family and too many hours not working on the things I wanted to build.

Enter Hayseed. I dropped the name Apple Core Labs and started operating under the name Hayseed. Why Hayseed? Well, a hayseed is a derogatory term for someone who isn’t so bright. I see myself has a digital hayseed. I don’t take offense to the term. I’m not sophisticated or the brightest bulb in the box, so I found it fitting, and it just so happened when I went to buy a domain name hayseed.co was available, which was perfect and surprising all at the same time.

Under the Hayseed name I spent a couple years, an hour here, hour there, building Stream, my feed reader. It is, by far, my favorite project to date. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. It did everything I wanted from a feed reader. It may not be wildly successful, but that’s ok, it lives on and I continue to work on it, ever so slowly, to improve it and add features.

Some day I hope to make Hayseed my full time job. My plan is to make it my retirement job. If it happens sooner, by some miracle, that would be great.

In the meantime I have a couple products I’d love to see y’all use. For the Clinical Pharmacists out there please give RxCalc a try. If you are a blogger or avid reader of news, please give Stream a try.

Please send any feedback you may have directly to hello@hayseed.co. I love getting it, even if it’s bad, but I much prefer positive feedback. 😃

If you’d like to support my little projects you can purchase RxCalc directly in the App Store for $2.99, leave a tip for me in Stream by going to Settings > Tip Jar, or support me directly through my Ko-fi account.

Stream version 1.2.1

Stream

This release of Stream fixes a couple bugs.

1. Fixed layout issue with progress indicator so it’s properly centered. (Thanks, Marc!)

2. Fixed a bug that could cause the progress indicator to remain on the screen while importing feeds when a network failure occurred.

Go get it in the App Store!

Tip: How to backup your Stream feeds

Stream,

After you’ve created your perfect set of feeds you may want to do a backup so you don’t lose it. But how?

It’s easier than you might think. Here’s how.

  1. Select the Setting icon in the upper left corner of the title bar
  2. Select Export Subscriptions
  3. Choose the location to save your subscription OPML file
  4. Tap the Save button

That’s it. You now have a backup copy of your subscriptions.

If you have iCloud storage, Dropbox, or one of many other cloud storage providers with a Files extension you can backup to any of them. That way you have a copy in the mystical cloud so you don’t lose it if something catastrophic happens to your device.

Happy Stream’ing.

Stream 1.1

Stream

This release includes two upgrades to existing features and one bug fix.

? The first, and biggest, upgrade is the reading experience in the Article view. Various text and paragraph formatting styles are now supported.

? The second upgrade is displaying linked items inside the application instead of opening Safari. Small, but it does make for a better experience.

? The one bug fix was something I wanted to fix for quite a while. Certain feeds – like Medium – did not include their content in a way Stream knew how to parse them. That bug has finally been sent packing.

Sorry for the bug ?

App Store, Stream

So, we’ve had a little problem with version 1.0.1. ?

When you go to leave a tip you’re not going to see any tip amounts to choose from. ??‍♂️

Version 1.0.2 has been submitted to Apple for review. With any luck it’ll pass review and the tip amounts will magically appear. ???

Stream 1.0.1

Stream

Nothing major to share. Version 1.0.1 completes the Tip Jar we intended to ship in 1.0.

Why a Tip Jar?

Well, a one time price isn’t sustainable in the long run, even for a one person shop. And subscription fatigue is a thing.

If you’re interested in leaving a tip you can to to settings, scroll to the bottom, tap on Tip Jar, and pick an amount you’d like to tip.

Do I have to leave you a tip to open up features? Nope. Stream will work the same for everyone.

Enjoy!