ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Roberto Alsina <roberto.alsina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 10:08 AM, David Planella
<david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Lisette Slegers <
> lisette.slegers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> During the RSS hangout today, we talked a little bit about saving
>> offline, and there are some interesting questions we should consider.
>>
>> If the app currently saves all the articles in the reader's stream into
>> the local database, how is the app affected if:
>>
>>    1. The reader subscribes to *a lot* of feeds.
>>    2. The reader has used up a lot of storage on his phone (storing
>>    music and videos for example).
>>
>> Could the user run out of space in the scenarios above? What would happen
>> in that case; would you prioritise new articles and chuck out old ones? I
>> guess that would be fine as long as your history has an acceptable size,
>> although it might be confusing for a user if the app sometimes saves 2 days
>> of history, and sometimes 2 hours if there is not enough space on the
>> device.
>>
>> Imagine the reader with a lot of subscriptions. His feed stream is more
>> like a tsunami. He skims the article headlines very quickly and only opens
>> a small percentage to read the first paragraph. Even fewer articles he
>> saves to read in full at a later stage. Perhaps headlines are more
>> important than the entire article? As long as a user has not saved an
>> article, I think it is fair to assume we have an internet connection
>> available to load the article. Or perhaps it could be a mix of online and
>> offline depending on the amount of available storage.
>>
>> It would also be good to know whether we can technically save articles
>> offline including the images. If it is not possible for version 1, it would
>> still be useful to let users bookmark an article so that they can easily
>> find it back later. As long as we use correct wording to clarify
>> functionality to users ('bookmark' vs. 'save offline').
>>
>>
> CC'ing Roberto Alsina from the U1 team and Christian Dywan from the SDK
> team, who's the expert on the U1DB QML bindings.
>
> @Roberto, Christian, do you think that could be a good use case for U1DB
> storage? Do you think it might be a good idea to store RSS articles (text +
> images) in U1DB for bookmarking them? Or do you think offline reading
> support should be only on a per-device basis and better stored in a cache?
>
>
I would use U1DB for storing things like "favourites" and what articles
have been read or not, but not for offline
reading, because the cost of syncing is probably offset by the
inefficiency, since articles are mostly read once, in one device, right?

So, syncing that same article to N devices more or less guarantees N-1
copies are never going to be read.