New Article Cache

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Fiery Feeds 2.12 is released with a completely rewritten article cache, full support for iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, and new article filters.

New Caching Logic

I’ve replaced the old, Objective-C based caching logic with completely new Swift code, including all of the new things like Swift concurrency, allowing the app to run text extraction, image search, downloads as parallel as possible – previously on the image downloads would download a few images in parallel.

  • Text Extraction now runs entirely on device, which is not just a lot faster, I can now also drop the previous 1000 articles per sync limit, not that many people ran into it, but it feels a lot cleaner without it.
  • Text Extraction is actually fast enough now, that if the app doesn’t find a preview image in the article text, it can quickly try to extract the preview image from the linked website, while scrolling through the article list, which means way more articles can have a preview image now.
  • Image downloads are now performed as background download tasks, meaning the can continue to download even when the app is closed – which is somewhat important, because the app needs to sync fast for background refreshes.
  • Images in the extracted text mode are now also cached during sync, if the feed is set to use the text mode, and for very truncated articles, the extracted text can even be used for the preview text in the article list.
  • Caching is no longer considered part of “syncing”, meaning the app is ready to display the new articles sooner – and you could even start syncing again, while it is still caching.
  • Finding and downloading favicons has been improved too – it should now find and show a favicon for just about every feed.
New App Icons

There are now dark and tinted versions of all available app icons.

But because every color variant of every icon now needs an additional 1024×1024 dark and an additional 1024×1024 tinted icon file, I’ve removed the “Newspaper” style icons from the available alternative icons, they’ve always been my least favourite. (Roughly 40MB of the 100MB storage required by the app binary alone are just the app icons).

New Articles

Finally there’s a new “New Articles” smart view and filter for smart searches, which included only articles found during the last sync, which is slightly different than the “Recent Articles” smart view, which only relies on the published date.

As always the update is rolling out as automatic update over the next 7 days, but you can download it directly here.