Palm Tree Development Update #3

Palm Tree v0.0.1 (71) is now available on TestFlight for alpha testers.

macOS Performance

I have spent an inordinate amount of time working through macOS performance issues—specific to the article timeline—over the last few weeks. I wanted to keep the same List code across all platforms, but on macOS List performance was so bad¹ that some plumbing had to be done. After many attempts, I gave up on List and switched to a single-column Table and that solved all timeline-related issues.

Refresh Performance

The refresh logic has been re-worked to use HTTP conditional requests. As long as a server supports it, a refresh request will only get new data if new data has been published since the last request…speeding up the refresh request and (vastly) reducing the amount of data downloaded. Refresh performance has also been improved now that I’ve implemented Swift’s TaskGroups.

What’s New

• The above performance improvements let me work on the feature that has been requested via email, Mastodon, and TestFlight feedback: bulk feed imports via OPML (finally).

What’s Next

• OPML Export
• On-device Reader View
• Improvements to the Tag inspector (to allow you to tag feeds from there)
• Widgets (iOS)
• Improved keyboard navigation
• Timed refresh (macOS)