Carmen's Headline Viewer
Version 0.7.0 History

• 0.7.0 - 22 May 99
  Added lots of features:
  
  • The main dialog now includes an optional list of the active Providers. Clicking on a provider makes it the current provider. The list can be turned on and off in the Settings dialog.
    
  • Added "highlight new stories" preference setting. On by default. New stories (stories that were found on a provider but were not there on the previous refresh) are shown in bold. As a side effect, cleaned up the column header stuff a bit, making more room for titles. There is no more "*" column.
    
  • Stories from providers are now cached behind the scenes. Once the stories have been loaded from a provider, flipping to that provider will now go much more quickly.
    
  • The Settings dialog is now tabbed. The two tabs are General and Providers.
    
  • It is no longer necessary to explicitly set the type (Ultramode, ScriptingNews, or RSS) of each Provider. The type is now detected automatically each time the Provider is acessed.
    
  • The refresh time for providers that are not current now counts down in the background (the providers are not updated until they are current).
    
  • The hourglass cursor is now displayed while the browser is loading the story.
    
  • The current provider is now selected on entry to the Settings.
    
  • The Settings now include "Activate All" and "Deactivate All" buttons.
    
  • The buttons on the left side are successively hidden as the dialog is resized to be very narrow.
    
  • The Providers list can now be augmented by importing from the RSSMaker list at Image Alchemy.
    
  • A bug which caused the first provider to be needlessly loaded on startup was fixed.
    
  • There is now an "Update Interval" slider in the settings for each Headline Provider. It can be set to 1=24 hours between updates.
    
  • Default providers now refresh at 1 hour intervals instead of 30 minute intervals. Stored values of less than 1 hour are changed to 1 hour when this program is first run.
    
  • Settings sliders now show values (minutes or hours) to the right.
    
  • The Provider Description field now accepts multiple lines of text. The first line of text is shown in the tooltip on the visit ("!") button.
    
  • Added error handling for the Scripting format.
    
  • The timer used to flip between Providers is reset to the value in the settings each time a manual flip is done. This takes care of an annoying glitch that happens when the timer fires shortly after a manual flip is done.
    
  • The Column Headers checkbox has been deleted from the Provider Settings. Headers are now displayed for the Ultramode format and hidden for all of the others.
    
  • The "minutes to next update" tooltip on the Refresh button is now updated as the time counts down.
    
  • Added Hash code (of Title) to each Story. This is used to detect new stories in an efficient fashion.
    
  • Each provider now has its own XML Document. This is part of the work needed to get ready to load documents asynchronously.