Category Archives: Stream

Stream featured in the App Store

Stream, , , ,

A few weeks back Parker Ortolani mentioned Stream on Threads and Stream set a personal best for downloads at 255 over a couple days. Most of which came on day one.

After that we received a message from Apple saying they may feature Stream in the App Store. What! That was extremely exciting. So much so it was difficult to believe so we asked around and checked App Store Connect directly to verify it was the real deal. Certainly didn’t want to get fished, right?

At that point we reached out to The Iconfactory. Apple needed art work in a specific format that followed specific rules and The Iconfactory has been featured before and is full of excellent designers and illustrators. Artists all.

The process couldn’t have been easier. Reach out, get an estimate with two different options, make a decision about which works best for us, and sign the deal.

What Next?

The Iconfactory asked for any artwork I had for Stream. The honest answer is we didn’t have much, just the original icons and a hero image. With our fingers and toes crossed we sent the images over with our apologies, “Sorry, that’s all we have.” Their response was simple. Thanks, this is perfect!

After a couple days we were sent a proof of the artists design. It was absolutely stunning! Perfect! They asked for any changes we’d like to see. The answer back was easy — no changes needed!

We downloaded the final output a day or two later. It’s even better in its full Photoshop glory. To say we were exited is an understatement.

Upload to Apple

Right after downloading our gorgeous new artwork we uploaded the requested PSD to the link provided by Apple.

Now we wait thinking this may or may not happen. There was never a promise for a feature and we knew that going into it. That’s ok. We had to roll the dice on the off chance it would happen.

Fingers crossed we hit the submit button.

It’s featured!

Friday morning we checked the App Store as we’d done every day this week and would continue doing until we saw it or felt it wouldn’t happen.

Well, it did happen and we couldn’t be more thrilled!

Thank you Apple for featuring our little feed reader, it means loads! ❤️

Picture of the App Store featuring Stream

More about The Iconfactory

Why did we hire The Iconfactory? That is simple. We’re huge fans of their app and design work. They’ve delivered some of the most iconic designs in the industry all top notch. They’re a small shop with amazing talent top to bottom. Choosing them was easy.

We’d like to say thanks to three folks in particular; Ged Maheux, Anthony Piraino, and Cheryl Cicha. You made the process painless and enjoyable. It’s wonderful to work with folks who deliver amazing work ahead of schedule.

We are so grateful. ❤️

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.