Our official news app has been updated with some new features and a few much needed tweaks

Published on Tuesday, 14 April 2015 06:06

We have finally updated our app this afternoon which, for some of you, is something you have been hoping to have happen for awhile now. You may have seen us mentioning on G+ that we are redesigning the app with a whole new look. That isn't this update. What this update is for is to get ready for that one which will be coming soon. However, there are some new features added with this update and a few tweaks.

The New Explorer

One of the bigger features you will see is the ability to add/remove different modules on your own. While some of the modules in our app are still mandatory, like our RSS Feed for news, others are completely optional now. So, for example, if you have no need for our YouTube feed of videos, then you can remove it from being active in the app. If you decide that later on you do want to have that active, you can re-enable it.

Thanks to the new above feature, the forum notifications regarding new posts over on our forums is no longer mandatory to have. In other words if you want the notifications for Latest Forum Posts, you can enable them. If not, you can leave them disabled. That way you don't have to worry about getting notifications all the time. I know a lot of people didn't like them because, at times, it got a little spammy with the notifications due to random asshats registering on the forums before proceeding to spam multiple thread with useless spammy garbage. It hasn't happened in awhile though thankfully.

The new Explorer module is available in the Tools section of the main menu in the app.

TwitchTV Beta

If you watch our TwitchTV stream on your desktop or laptop, it is all good. Even with the TwitchTV app on your Android device, it is still a pretty good experience. However, there is only so much you can access with the TwitchTV app. So we have added the ability to see our past broadcasts and highlights through the DroidGamers app. To view the broadcast you want, just tap the Visit Website link in the broadcast you're interested in watching. The ability to actually watch our stream directly in the app itself will be arriving shortly, which is why this is labeled as beta.

Two new layouts

While the app still has the two themes it has always had, a white theme and a dark theme, there are now four different layouts to customize your app with. If you are updating your copy of our app, you can access these new layout in each feed's/module's settings (the top right three dot button). The new layouts are called Card List and Card Magazine. You should like them, or at least we hope you do.

Additional Customizing

Besides the two new layouts, users can now add their own feeds to the app as well as any Tapatalk enabled forums. There is no reason why we should limit what you do with our application and there is certainly no reason why you should have an app for every feed or site out there that you follow. Of course there are apps that do this already like Feedly and such but if you use our app already, you can now add additional feeds and Tapatalk compatible forums to it to have an even bigger and better experience using our app. You custom added feeds and forums will show up as their own menu item in the main menu.

Steps to add feeds and forums:

To add your own custom Feeds and Forums, go to the new Explorer Module (located under the Tools section on the main menu), tab on the tab matching the type of content you want to add (for example to add a Feed tap the Feed tab), then use the search function to look up the feed you want. It will find all the available feeds for that particular site. Then just tap on the feed you want to add, hit the top back arrow to exit and your new custom feed will have been added to the main menu

Additional Tweaks

Some people were having problems with YouTube videos loading inside articles in the app. This should be fixed now. There has also been plenty of new optimizations and tweaks for better performance as well as compatibility with the latest version of Android.

Since this is a major version change, if you experience any issues after updating, you can fix those easily by uninstall the app and reinstalling a fresh copy from Google Play. However, there should be no problems updating the app as-is. When you do, your current settings will still be active so if you want to access the new layouts, just follow the directions in the new layout description above. We have one more update coming in the next couple of week that will fix any bugs that show up with this release as well as the overall new layout/theme for the app as a whole. We will be opening up beta testing for that version shortly. Android Wear support will also come with that update.

We hope you enjoy this update. You'll have to excuse the slow posting on the site yesterday. We wanted to get this done and out yesterday and while we did accomplish that, we ended up having to wait awhile for it to actually appear on Google Play. This is just the first in a whole lot of awesome changes coming to DroidGamers over the next month.

AndrewH - Andrew is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of DroidGamers. Having been a hardcore PC and console gamer all his life, this passion is now applied to Android gaming and writing about it. When not playing or writing about Android games, he spends his time with is wife and son.

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source: droidgamers