RSS-Parser VS flexbox-layout

- I want to use a “disposable” browser and not my main one for reading, where I can nuke navigation data or auto-handle cookie banners (DuckDuckGo or Firefox Focus).

With that in mind, I decided to start the development of FeedFlow and now it's available for Android, iOS and macOS. On the tech side it's built with Jetpack Compose for the Android app, Compose Multiplatform for the desktop app, and SwiftUI for the iOS app. And the parsing is done with a library that I've developed called RSSParser: https://github.com/prof18/RSS-Parser

FeedFlow offers a minimalistic feeds list and it opens the articles on their respective websites with the broswer of your choice (on mobile). FeedFlow also supports importing an existing RSS collection through OPML files.

Feel free to ask any questions or share any feedback. Looking forward to it!

- Marco

In order to properly encapsulate the reaction view logic, we created a class that extends RecyclerView and has a bind method that takes in the list of reactions and updates the RecyclerView’s adapter with that list. Given that we had to support a multi-line layout, we initially looked into using GridLayoutManager to achieve this but ended up finding an open-source library by Google named flexbox-layout that provides a LayoutManager that supports laying out items in multiple flex-rows, which is exactly what we needed. Using these ingredients, we were able to get a simple version of our layout up and running. What’s next was adding custom animations and improving performance.

You could use FlexBoxLayout, though that's for the old system.

I would highly recommend using sp for text sizes as users can change the font size in their settings. So if someone has bad vision and large text, your app would be disregarding scaling the text up. This does make it more difficult to create layouts that work for all text sizes, but there are patterns such as a constraint layout flow or flex box which will make everything in one row if the content fits our stack on top of each other if it doesn't fit in a single row.

This blog doesn't really mention the actual case Flow tries to solve. It is more akin to FlexBoxLayout where it can wrap the row/column if the child widget's size exceeds the size of the container.