SBSH Software has just released an update to their RSS reader application, GoNews Touch.  Version 1.1, a free upgrade for registered users of 1.0, incorporates several new features, most notably including support for syncing with your Google Reader account.  The update also includes better support for automatic updating and several usability enhancements.

Keep reading for the full GoNews Touch 1.1 press release from SBSH Software:

What’s New With GoNews Touch 1.1 – Give Me The Details!

1. Google Reader

With this new version we’ve focused on one of the most requested features we’ve been receiving from our users which is Google Reader Syncing support! This means that you can easily configure your Google Reader account details within GoNews Touch configuration and GNT will automatically add the same channels you’ve been following within your Google Reader account to GoNews Touch!

Once you configure your Google Reader account information within GNT, GNT will sync with your Google Reader account content upon each of your regular content updates. The entire syncing process is completely automatic and require no special handling after initial configuration.

GoNews Touch offers an advanced syncing capabilities with your Google Reader, so apart from the regular channels and articles syncing, GNT will also sync the read-status of each of your articles from Google Reader to GNT and vice-versa. This means that if you read an article and the read-status changes from unread to read, upon your next data-syncing the new read-status flag will also be updated within your Google Reader account, and of course this works also the other way around.

With this new Google Reader syncing implemented, GoNews Touch provides the best touch-design user interface for your Google Reader content directly on your Windows Mobile device! This brings far more powerful capabilities to GNT!

2. Auto-Updates

GoNews Touch auto-updates implementation was vastly improved. Our first goal was to improve the way auto-updates are implemented, then we worked some more to add powerful auto-update options to GNT, such that will help each user to configure the best auto-updating behavior for his specific needs.

One of the limitations we had with previous versions of GNT was that auto-updates worked only when GNT process was running at the background of the device. This limitation caused many users to miss their scheduled auto-updates with GNT when they didn’t had it running at the device background. With this new version we’ve re-implemented completely the way auto-updates are working, taking far better advantage of some of the unique Windows Mobile backend systems, so auto-updates are now triggered properly even if GNT isn’t running at the background at the time of the scheduled auto-update!

In addition to the ability to auto-update even if GNT isn’t running at the same time, we’ve added new configuration options that will help you configure auto-updates exactly when you want it to run! With this new version you can now have auto-updates running only if the device is connected via ActiveSync, or, try to auto-update if any connection of any type is available.

We’ve also added the ability to setup time-based auto-updates so the user can configure a certain hour of the day he would like the auto-update to run.

We believe that good auto-updating capabilities is a vital part of a newsreader type of application such as GoNews Touch and therefore we placed a lot of focus and work time improving GoNews Touch auto-updating capabilities! I really hope that this is something many of our users will be glad to see improved with this new version.

3. More Gestures and Increased Display

Some good new improvements are waiting for users at the Article Display dialog. The first thing you will notice is that you can now easily navigate between the different articles using horizontal gestures, this means that swiping your finger on the article page from right to left will take you to the next article and an opposite swipe takes you to the previous article – this way allowing you to navigate between different articles similar to regular newspaper page swiping.

Additionally, when viewing an article longer than the screen height we removed the OS scrollbar on the right side, this way achieving larger screen display so more content of your article can fit in the screen. Scrolling still works in a similar way using vertical finger swipe as before, only that this way users can enjoy more screen real estate for their article display!

4. Usability Improvements

This new version brings lots of small changes, all together vastly improve the user experience with GoNews Touch! To list a few of these small changes you will find with this new version:

4.1. Better Read Status Mark – Read/unread articles within the channel view display are now marked with a gray vs. colored article type icon. This means that articles that were already read will have a gray article-type icon (RSS/Full text icon), while the article-type icon for unread articles will be colored, as it was until now. This improvement comes in addition to the use of bold/regular font type to indicate read/unread status. We’ve added this as an additional measure to help users easily identify the read-status of articles after many users mentioned the bold/regular font type isn’t always clear enough.  The beta testing team were very happy with this new addition and I’m positive this is something you will find really useful!

4.2. Improved New Channel Wizard – The New Channel Wizard which is used to add new channels to GNT was re-designed to include better logic. Among the changes you will find a special option to import OPML channel files, making the import process much simpler than before, the new Google Reader configuration option and more changes. The overall navigation within the wizard was also improved to make it easier and more powerful.

4.3. Redesigned Touch Items – All of the full-screen menu items used with GoNews Touch within all of the different views were re-designed, featuring a new and far better looking style with it!

4.4. Bug Fixes and Download Speed Improvements – Apart from the above you will also find lots of great new improvements available with this new version which I’m sure you will notice while playing with this new version. One of the last important improvements we’ve been working on with this new version is code optimization related to the download speed GNT uses which should help improve the content download speed rate nicely with this new version!
Registering and Upgrading GoNews Touch 1.1

GoNews Touch costs $14.95 and can be registered via our online store at the following link:
http://hce.handango.com/HCE/checkout/Cart….://www.sbsh.net

Users who registered GoNews Touch in the past are entitled to upgrade to the new version for free. To do so, simply download the new version from the link below and install it on top of the current version you are using. Your registration information will automatically carry to the new version and you will be able to enjoy all of the new features right away!

GoNews Touch 1.1 Download Links
Click here to download GoNews Touch PC installer
Click here to download GoNews Touch OTA (CAB) installer

Future Plans and Development Thoughts
We really hope that you will all enjoy the new GoNews Touch release! We’ve been working really hard on the development and design improvements with this new version and we plan to continue and improve GNT with each of our upcoming new updates in the future too!   We’ve already started defining and designing our path towards the upcoming update so you can be sure we plan to maintain this fast development pace with lots of additional things that are waiting ahead for us!

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