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IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

marco.org

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Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#2
I wouldn't say that the articles' metadata (URL, title, date of download, maybe thumbnail of the 1st page) is downloaded content. It's clearly user-generated, and should be in the "home" of the app IMHO.

The articles themselves, yes, send them to the cache. If the user needs to reclaim the storage used up by the articles, let the OS delete them. Then, when the user needs to read the article again, it will take some time to download. But don't get into an "all articles gone" situation. Just my 2 cents.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#4
post #2

I wouldn't say that the articles' metadata (URL, title, date of download, maybe thumbnail of the 1st page) is downloaded content. It's clearly user-generated, and should be in the "home" of the app IMHO. The articles themselves, yes, send them to the cache. If the user needs to reclaim the storage used up by the articles, let the OS delete them. Then, when the user needs to read the article again, it will take some t…

I'd submit that this is, in some ways, worse: instead of all articles being gone they're now all grayed out, so the user knows they were here, can still see there, but if he's offline he can not access them because only the metadata is left, the data itself is gone.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#6
If the device is low on space I think it makes sense for Apple to purge cached data and tmp directories. For an app like Instapaper which relies on local documents, some of the documents should (imho) be saved to the home directory instead. And yes, I know this is hard but I'm just thinking aloud.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#7
Clearly, apps that cache data need to be modified to show the difference between having no data and having no data cached. IMAP clients have dealt with this, for example; they show a message like "the contents of this folder are not available offline".

Perhaps Apple could have made cache cleaning opt-in on a per-app basis until iOS 6, though.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#8
post #2

I wouldn't say that the articles' metadata (URL, title, date of download, maybe thumbnail of the 1st page) is downloaded content. It's clearly user-generated, and should be in the "home" of the app IMHO. The articles themselves, yes, send them to the cache. If the user needs to reclaim the storage used up by the articles, let the OS delete them. Then, when the user needs to read the article again, it will take some t…

I thought Instapaper scraped the page and stored that, to accommodate sites that require login for access. So not trivial to just re-download the articles. Plus the whole point is to have them available when you're offline.

I'd say in this case, the content is user-generated and should be backed up.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#9
post #2

I wouldn't say that the articles' metadata (URL, title, date of download, maybe thumbnail of the 1st page) is downloaded content. It's clearly user-generated, and should be in the "home" of the app IMHO. The articles themselves, yes, send them to the cache. If the user needs to reclaim the storage used up by the articles, let the OS delete them. Then, when the user needs to read the article again, it will take some t…

[deleted]

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#10
Is it possible that a user could use Instapaper to save a document that they wouldn't be able to download later, even if they had access to an internet connection? If that's possible, I think Instapaper would have every right to store things in the Documents folder, since you're asking it to create something more akin to an archive than a temporary cache of data.
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