IMatch 2018 Sneak Preview: News App

[Mario]

As a recreational activity  I have written a new App: News.

This app displays excepts of the last 20 recent posts in this community!
It also retrieves "news" I have published, e.g. about new IMatch releases, new tutorial videos, know-how articles and similar. No SPAM, no ads of course.

Many users disable the "Allow newsletter" option in the customer portal, or emails I send out are blocked by SPAM filters or ISPs. Only a handful of users subscribes to my the photools.com Facebook page or the photools.com Twitter account (see below in my signature).

I guess that if there is an app inside IMatch itself which allows me to occasionally broadcast news about important things, I may reach more users.
Also, having an easy way to see new posts in this community and to open them with a mouse-click should be a time saver for many.

I had the idea for this a while ago, always moving it around on my Kanban board...and since I had a sort of breakthrough with one long-going challenge (more on this in a bit) I gave myself a few hours off. To lean about RSS feeds, how to handle them on my server to make them available to IMatch apps and lots more.

The outcome of this is the News App, which will be part of IMatch 2018 

This is how it looks. As you can see, it contains two (fake) messages from photools.com (moi!) and a real live feed of posts made in this community (click to zoom image):

[BanjoTom]

I think the News App will actually be quite helpful, at least for those of us who check in with the Photools community forum every day, or even more frequently. 

[Mario]

I think so too.

I have to check the community for new posts several times a day. The News app tells me when there are new posts - this saves time. Push is better than pull, in this case.
It also should provide useful for the more active users here in the community. You can check quickly if there is something of interest and then continue with whatever you are doing.

[Kucera]

Hi, looks good. Just a question - will the RSS feed continue, too? It allows me to (sort of) keep track of all the interesting stuff going on even when I am outside of IMatch. Would be a pity to lose that.
Regards Emil

[Mario]

This app uses the RSS feed as well.
The community supports plain XML, RSS, RSS2 and ATOM feeds. I use the more modern ATOM feed for this app.