[amitregev]

Hi all

After working extensively for the past few 3 months, we are really excited to announce today the release of the all new GoNews Touch 1.2!!

GoNews Touch 1.2 is, without a doubt, the most polished, optimized, fastest release for GoNews Touch we've had since we initially introduced the new application earlier this year. This new version introduce some really exciting new innovations that will definitely get our users excited about. Along with new features we've also worked really hard optimizing our existing code, fixing reported bugs and much more - so we are positive our users are going to be really excited to try this new release!

To prevent any confusion I'll just mention it here - this new update is a free update for all previous owners of GoNews Touch. More details how to upgrade to this new latest version is included towards the bottom of this post.

Without any further ado, let's move forward and start reviewing the interesting things you will find with this new GoNews Touch release!

What's New With GoNews Touch 1.2?

1. Full Screen Reading – The first thing you will notice once installing the new version is the new full screen reading mode feature! With this new feature, when reading articles with GoNews Touch, articles will now display in full-screen mode, which means both the top bar and bottom bar are automatically hidden each time you start reading an article.

With this new feature users can enjoy approx. 25% more screen display when reading articles, and therefore read more easily articles with more content displayed in one screen!

In full-screen reading mode, you can use left/right finger gestures to flip through the different available articles, and use up/down finger gestures to scroll through the current article content.

At the right bottom corner of the screen you will notice a small menu-like floating button, pressing this button will exit the full screen reading mode and will bring back the top and bottom bars, so you can easily reach the additional options and get back to GoNews articles and channel views. If you didn't perform any actions within 5 seconds after pressing the floating menu button, GoNews Touch will activate the full screen reading mode again automatically, so you don't need to press any button to get back to this mode.

Users who prefer to disable the new Full Screen Reading mode, will find an option to disable it through GoNews General settings section.

From my personal experience using this new version for the past few weeks, this new feature dramatically improved my experience with GoNews Touch, making it FAR more optimized client for reading news with this increased display of content. We really hope that our users will also enjoy this new addition!


2. Touch Popup Menu - As part of our focus on easy-of-use we've implemented exciting new touch-popup menus!! The new popup menus act like regular Windows Mobile context menus and will open when you tap-and-hold any of the items within GoNews, however, unlike old context menu interface, the new popup menus use touch-interface to continue the touch-design used by GoNews Touch, so you can use easily use the popup menu options with finger navigation without any problem.

Each of the popup menus include operation specific to the chosen item and make it far more intuitive to work with GoNews Touch!



3. Online Feed Searching – When adding new channels you will now find a new Online Searching option, allowing users to search for feeds through an online search engine directly from within GoNews Touch, choose the desired feeds and add them as new channels within GoNews Touch!

The new Online Searching option is based on top of Google API and should help users, especially new users, locate new feeds far more quickly and easily.


4. Multi-Language Support - The new version is the first to introduce multi-language support for GoNews interface! With great help from our users who helped us translate the new version, in addition to the default English interface, GoNews now also includes translations for: German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

Many thanks to all users who helped us working together on the new translations!

GoNews translations are managed by simple text files that are installed at the GoNews installation folder. This means that users can easily duplicate the default English translation file and create new translations for GoNews Touch! If any of our users choose to do so, please post back with the new translation file you created here too and we would love to include the new translation too as part of the upcoming new GoNews Touch update!

5. Usability Improvements and Bug Fixes - In addition to the larger changes we've listed here above, the new version also includes a great deal of bug fixed and code optimization that make this version the best GoNews release we've had until today! Among the new smaller-changes (and yet very important) you will find:

5.1. Download Speed Improvements - We re-wrote major parts of the GoNews engine and you should notice a great speed improvement when performing updates with the new version!

5.2. Read Articles While Updating - Unlike the previous version, you can now open channels and read articles while updating GoNews content, so you don't have to wait anymore for the content update to complete before you can start browsing the newly downloaded content.

5.3. Improved Touch Tray Bar - The touch tray bar received a nice improvement and when pressing one of the bar buttons it will now show a quick highlight mark on the pressed button so the user can easily know that the button was indeed pressed.

5.4. Many More Bug Fixes - In addition to the change log we listed here, we've been working really hard for the past 3 months nailing all bug reports that we've received since the last version and during the beta testing stages. All together this new GoNews Touch version is the most optimized and stable release for GoNews Touch and definitely one that our users will love! While using the new version you are most likely to notice additional smaller changes that we're listed with this new release post here which we hope you will also enjoy.

GoNews Touch 1.2 Download Links

Click here to download GoNews Touch PC installer
Click here to download GoNews Touch OTA (CAB) installer


Registering GoNews Touch 1.2 For New Users

GoNews Touch costs $14.95 and can be registered at our online store using the following link:
https://www.mobihand...d=362&pid=30309

Upgrading to GoNews Touch 1.2 For Registered Users

Registered users can upgrade to the new version free of charge. Simply download the new version and install it on top of the previous version to complete the upgrade.


Future Plans and Upcoming Development

We plan to continue our development for the GoNews Touch project and we will shortly announce some really exciting news for it! I can already hint that GoNews Touch will shortly be available for users with additional mobile platforms, along with some new features that we planned - stay tuned at our forums for more news on this.. We would also like to thank all GoNews Touch beta group members that worked with us extensively on this new version and helped us bring such polished new release!

As always, myself and Junjie, the GoNews Touch project manager, are looking forward for all your thoughts, wishes and bug reports about this new version - so please be sure to post back with your thoughts about this new release!

Good day all!

[rgb-rgb]

Congratulations on this release Amit and SBSH. Thanks also to Junjie.

I know this release will make a lot of people happy as it is improved very much.

I know the speed is a big improvement over previous versions. I also like the full screen reading ability. Very nice.

Thanks

[amitregev]

rgb-rgb, on 11 November 2009 - 08:06 PM, said:

Congratulations on this release Amit and SBSH. Thanks also to Jungie.

I know this release will make a lot of people happy as it is improved very much.

I know the speed is a big improvement over previous versions. I also like the full screen reading ability. Very nice.

Thanks

Many thanks Robert for the great support and also for your help with the beta testing and valuable input! I sure hope that our users will love this new release and I definitely agree that this version really improve things amazingly!

If any of our users can publish about the new release on other forum/blogs/twitter this will be really helpful too to spread the word around

[Djblois]

I Just installed GoNews Touch for the First time and I love it. I do have a few things that would make it better:

1) Right now you can flick up and down on a context menu and it will scroll and bounce back but their is no reason for that. Because there are no other options.

2) I would like to tap and hold on a Channel and have it the Context Menu - Delete All in Channel

3) Why doesn't it sync my Google Reader Categories? just the feeds? I am already putting them in Categories on Google Reader and now I have to Categorize them in GoNews also? That is a lot of extra work.

I will come back with more as I see them.

[wonsanim]

Congratulations Amit & Junjie

This is really a great RSS Reader,very stable the best Build ever. Congratulation in a Job Well Done

[Cocotteseb]

Congratulations for this new release ! (in French ! )

GoNews Touch is a really good rss reader now and it looks so nice ! I use it every day !

[John N.]

Glad to see this version out.

BTW, unnecessary drainning battery when GoNews somehow disabling auto off of device when it is updating articles. Why auto off of device disabled?

[stetre76]

congrats on the new release - seems like a real improvement on the update speed has been achieved!

[amitregev]

Hi Daniel

Djblois, on 11 November 2009 - 09:01 PM, said:

I Just installed GoNews Touch for the First time and I love it. I do have a few things that would make it better:

You definitely arrived to a good version release This new version is definitely the best GoNews Touch release we've had until now

Djblois, on 11 November 2009 - 09:01 PM, said:

1) Right now you can flick up and down on a context menu and it will scroll and bounce back but their is no reason for that. Because there are no other options.

This is also the way our menus are working with Calendar Touch and the latest PocketBreeze version. It is similar to the menus design used with the iPhone and Android devices - simply because this gives a more "streamed" feeling to users and therefore we believe is a better UI decision. It simply gives a better feeling to the user to understand he reached the end of the menu this way rather than simply blocking the scrolling completely...

Djblois, on 11 November 2009 - 09:01 PM, said:

2) I would like to tap and hold on a Channel and have it the Context Menu - Delete All in Channel

We've option exists within the menu of each channel, but it isn't included on the popup menu when hitting a specific channel in the Channels list view. This means, if you enter a specific channel and open the main menu for this channel you will find the option to delete all the items within this channel. Adding this option also to the context menu of each channel should be simpler and we'll be sure to look in to adding this too ASAP

Djblois, on 11 November 2009 - 09:01 PM, said:

3) Why doesn't it sync my Google Reader Categories? just the feeds? I am already putting them in Categories on Google Reader and now I have to Categorize them in GoNews also? That is a lot of extra work.

I will have to leave this one for Junjie who is more familiar with the technical details why something like this is limited, so he will soon give you some more feedback about this one

[amitregev]

wonsanim, on 11 November 2009 - 10:22 PM, said:

Congratulations Amit & Junjie

This is really a great RSS Reader,very stable the best Build ever. Congratulation in a Job Well Done

Many thanks Wonsanim!

[amitregev]

John N., on 12 November 2009 - 03:19 AM, said:

Glad to see this version out.

BTW, unnecessary drainning battery when GoNews somehow disabling auto off of device when it is updating articles. Why auto off of device disabled?

Hi John

Can you include a bit more details what is the behavior you are seeing?

[amitregev]

stetre76, on 12 November 2009 - 08:34 AM, said:

congrats on the new release - seems like a real improvement on the update speed has been achieved!

Thanks Stefan! I'm glad to hear that indeed things are running faster for you with this new update release!

[Junjie Wang]

Djblois, on 12 November 2009 - 03:01 AM, said:

3) Why doesn't it sync my Google Reader Categories? just the feeds? I am already putting them in Categories on Google Reader and now I have to Categorize them in GoNews also? That is a lot of extra work.

Hi Daniel,

Many thanks for your input on these problems ! Currently GNT has synced GReader categories but they are not displayed in GNT. We plan to add category(in GReader, category is named label or folder) selection for Google Reader channels in the future version.

All GReader channels are placed in a category named "Google Reader" in GNT. These channels also have their own folders in GReader. A extra folder selection definitely will make these channels better organized. I believe this feature will be included in the following minor update.

[YoLoLo]

I like the full screen reading and the search option !



Nice job to all (included beta testers )


Edit :
Errr In the French translation, one thing weird or Google translated !

Junjie, can you correct the french file for a future version ?
Get More Apps = Obtenir Apps supplémentaires
The 'automatic' version is just not... appropriate !

[Junjie Wang]

YoLoLo, on 12 November 2009 - 08:54 PM, said:

I like the full screen reading and the search option !



Nice job to all (included beta testers )

Hi YoLoLo, many thanks for your support !