[Nook Touch Themes and Apps] nmyshkin:
Back in Nov. 2018, the BBC News app (1.3.4) finally stopped working. Here's a browser-based replacement similar to my Google News app.

The BBC News website gives access to a considerable number of RSS feeds, likely much of the source of the old "carousel" of stories in the now-defunct app. My app collects the information from the RSS feeds of your choice and assembles them into a series of HTML pages suitable for Opera Mobile (see attached images below). It turns out that the actual BBC News website is pretty friendly to Opera Mobile, although--of course--a little slow, so any stories you choose to pursue are very readable. NoRefresh is nice.

Requirements

1. Android 2.1 has a security issue with opening local HTML files. In order for BBC News to work properly you need to address that. Included in the zip below is a tiny app, android-open-in-browser-0.0.4-4-debug. Install that. It's not my app but I have used it for years and wish I could credit the originator.

2. This is a Tasker-generated app. If you already have one of my other Tasker-generated apps or have previously installed GApps, you don't need the two Google maps library files included in the zip and can delete them. If you do need them, copy the two files into the locations shown below:

/system/etc/permissions/com.google.android.maps.xml

/system/framework/com.google.android.maps.jar

Set permissions for both files to rw-r--r-- and reboot.

Without these files resident, the app will not install.

3. Create a folder in the root directory of your sdcard: BBC News (exactly as shown)

4. Install the app itself, BBC_News.1.apk

How to use

Before you run the app you need to select some news categories. You can get the feed URLs from the BBC News RSS page linked earlier. Only part of the URL is used in the file bbc_rss_feeds.txt. Here is the file as I have supplied it in the attached zip:

<cat>World</cat>
<url>/news/world/rss.xml</url>
<cat>US & Canada</cat>
<url>/news/world/us_and_canada/rss.xml</url>

I've just used two example feeds. You can see that the first line in each pair is a news category name (don't use names with "." in them). The second line in each pair is the

last

part of the RSS feed URL from the BBC News site. Be sure to edit out the first part of the URL or the app will not work. You can, of course, choose other/additional categories. Just follow my example. When the file is complete, copy it to the "BBC News" folder on your SD card.

Now you're good to go. Start the app, make sure you're connected to WiFi. There are only three buttons on the app screen. The first one, "Fetch the news" does just that. You will see a little toast that the first news category is being prepared. Once that is done, you will be taken to the browser and that page will open. Meanwhile the remaining pages are being downloaded and reconstructed in the background.

The news page is very simple. I tried to aim for readability over all other considerations (this is the reason the news items are in bold black, even though they are the external links). I have my Opera Mobile set to 100% page zoom. It looks good to me, but you could probably get away with 75%. External websites are another matter. At the title bar left is a drop-down menu button that gives you access to your other news topics. Since no fixed navbar schemes work under Android 2.1, there is a duplicate drop-up menu bar at the end of the page.

Edit: you cannot use this app with Opera Mini. It lacks the ability to open local HTML files.

The second option on the opening screen, "Read old news" sounds a bit daft, but I just thought maybe someone might have been looking at the topic pages, saw something that interested them and then got interrupted. So this option opens the first local file in the browser again and you can navigate from there. Strictly speaking, WiFi is not needed to browse the local files once they have been created, but it is needed to pursue any stories.

The third option simply dismisses the app screen.

Enjoy!