Settings

Misc settings

  • Dark mode: Here you can select a darker theme, for those times when you want the screen to not glow too bright. The dark mode affects the main grid view and the news item preview view but not the web browser view. “Auto”: This means the same mode as the device is set to.
  • iCloud syncing: Here you can switch off synching of your feed list using iCloud.
  • Use bookmarks: Switch on if you want to use the bookmark functionality. Note that iCloud syncing also needs to be switched on for this to work.

You can also buy unlimited feeds from this view or restore your purchase of unlimited feeds (if you are setting up a new device); once this has been done, the buttons for buying/restoring will no longer be shown.

There are also buttons for showing some the internal help pages, essentially a condensed version of this site.

Thumbnails (main view) settings

  • Display thumbnails: Controls whether you want to see thumbnail images in the boxes in the main view or not.
  • Quality: Showing thumbnails might require a lot of memory, so here you can control the quality of the shown images; of course, for minimal memory impact you can also switch of the thumbnails completely.
  • Download: Showing thumbnails might also require quite a lot of bandwidth so here you can control whether to always download thumbnails or only doing so when on Wifi (so for devices without cellular data, this setting doesn’t matter).
  • Size: The grid size in the main view.
  • Font size: The size of the font used in the preview text atop the image for each item in the main view.
  • Text box: How big part of each item in the main view should be reserved for text.

Feeds & readings settings

  • Font size: Here you can set the font size to be used in the reading view for news items.
  • Max cached items / feed: Here you specify the max number of recent items kept per feed. Minimum value is 25, maximum value is up to you (but the higher the number, the more memory the app will use).
  • Allow feed sharing: If enabled, the feed URLs you’ve added to the app will be used for creating suggested list of feeds for users. This is completely anonymous; I’m not interested in advertisements and similar, and just want to be able to give especially new users some good feeds to pick from.
  • Reverse click logic: If enabled, the long-click and short-click in the main view will works the opposite way. I.e. regular clicking will take you to the web view, whereas long-click will take you to the preview view.
  • External browser: If enabled, reading an item on the web will take you to your default web browser instead of the built-in Safari view.
  • Fullsceen preview: iPad-only, this enables you to open the preview view in fullscreen mode instead of the standard popup mode.

Feed-specific settings

In the main view, click the three small dots furthest to the right of every feed title:

  • Include in badges: If enabled, unread items in the feed will be added to the badge number for the app.
  • Skip item preview: If enabled, clicking an item will always take you directly to the web view, regardless if you click or long-click.
  • Use time sorting: Per default, Heartfeed will show news items for a feed in whatever order the feed itself sends them in. For most feeds this is chronological, but some feeds send them in an order calculated by some algorithm (e.g. in order of popularity). For such feeds, enable this to always sort items chronologically.
  • Custom name: If you prefer a custom name for the feed to be shown instead of the feed default one, input that name here.
  • Clicking the checkmark will mark all items in the feed as read.
  • Clicking the clipboard will copy the feed address to the clipboard.

Advanced settings

For advanced users which e.g. use launcher apps, Heartfeed supports a custom URL scheme: heartfeed://. This scheme has a single use: Opening this URL, you will switch over to the Heartfeed app.

In the future, the scheme might be extended for other uses but as of right now, this is the only supported usage.