yole's devblog

20030216

• Improved detecting of updated items. Now an item is not marked as updated if only the HTML tags or whitespace have been changed, and the publication date (when present) is used as the unique identifier of the item.
• Made some tweaks to ensure that Graphics objects are released as soon as possible. Hopefully this will fix the resource exhaustion problems some Win98 users have encountered.
• Added the possibility to configure the default feed settings. Changing a default setting modifies the respective setting of all feeds which used the previous default value for the setting.
• Syndirella now displays authors and categories for those weblogs which have them. Just as usual, the new fields will appear only for new items, and not for those which have already been loaded with previous Syndirella builds.
• It is now possible to sort the list of items in a feed by any column in any direction.
• Added support for Windows XP themes. The drawing glitches that prevented earlier inclusion of the manifest file are now fixed.
• Added a command line option '-minimize' to run Syndirella minimized.
• Added an option "Close button minimizes to tray". If the option is checked, clicking the "X" button of the Syndirella window hides it to the tray. To exit Syndirella, you should select "File/Exit" or "Exit" from the tray icon popup menu.
• Added keyboard shortcut for the feed properties dialog - Ctrl-F10.
• Added the link to the Syndirella discussion group in the About dialog.
• Marking all items as read now happens faster and with less flicker.

Download binaries, sources or installer.

From now on, I'll start pushing towards the release of 0.91. I'll stick to the initial plan and leave the new hierarchical feed list code developed by Joe Hildebrand to the next version (the code is not yet finished enough to be integrated quickly and with few problems).

There are two main things that need to be addressed before I can release 0.91.

One is the tray icon animation, which is annoying to many people. I'll have to find some option that, on one hand, provides a sufficiently visible notification that some new items have arrived, and on the other hand, doesn't attract attention when the user wants to focus on something else.

Another problem is feed update error handling. I've already got some complaints from the web site administrators that Syndirella is polling their sites far too often (once a minute or so). I'll need to make sure that fatal errors (like 404 errors) are reported as message boxes and not as status bar notiications. And for intermittent problems, Syndirella should switch to polling once an hour if five update attemps in a row (done once a minute) fail.

Other than that, my main focus will be stability and performance enhancements. Don't expect any major new features after today's build.

Posted by yole at February 16, 2003 12:52 AM | TrackBack