Newsstand 2 has been out for over a month now and I’d like to thank everybody who has sent in feedback and bug reports. I’ve been working on this new version for over four months, basically rewriting and redesigning everything from scratch.
The 2.1 update has mostly been about bugfixes and minor usability enhancements, so let’s move on to what you can expect in version 2.2.
First of all, this update introduces a new sync method for Google Reader: Instead of refreshing every feed individually, you can optionally refresh categories as a whole, which results in fewer network requests and typically a much faster synchronization. You will still be able to sync individual feeds to load older news, but the new default is to download the latest articles across all feeds within each category.
Sharing news has always been one of Newsstand’s key features and the new version (finally) allows to use Google Reader’s own sharing feature as well. Shared articles have a special marker in the article list, so you can easily see which ones are public.
Speaking of which, the sharing menu also sees a complete redesign that preserves more screen real estate for the actual content you are about to share. For Delicious, Instapaper and ReadItLater, there’s a new “Save Immediately” option that skips the dialog to enter a title etc. and just saves the article with the default title.
Another feature that you requested a lot is to hide feeds and categories without unread articles. This will also be possible with the new release; just tap the little “Hide read feeds” button at the bottom of the list. The setting also applies to the newspaper view, so you can flip through just the newspapers that you haven’t seen yet.