What was wrong with Byline 1.0?
Byline 1.0 was the result of only three months of frenzied development. It had a number of shortcomings; one of the main ones was that it would only sync twenty-five items from each list at a time. When syncing each list it would initiate a download of data for the newest twenty-five items, wait for the download to finish, and then use the data to update the list. This was easy to code, as all the Atom parsing and updating of the data model and user interface could be done in a single step. So what was wrong with Byline 1.0? Nothing! This method of syncing worked well, because Byline only ever had to process twenty-five new items at a time. There wasn’t a problem until Byline 1.0.2, which offered an option to sync up to two hundred items at a time from each list. Suddenly, the processing time required to parse the data for a whole list in one big chunk was long enough to make the user interface freeze noticeably. The processor would sit idle until the data had downloaded in full, and t
