Carmen's Headline Viewer
Version 0.8.9 History
   
 
  • 0.8.9 - 8 Sep 99
    Some great new features and bug fixes:
  • New providers:
    Techdirt 
    Linux Telephony
    SmoGAlert 
    GameDev.net
    Jon Udell
    The SAX Post
  • Another list of headline providers (mainly weblogs) can now be loaded from the GrokSoup website using the "Add GrokSoup Providers" button in the Settings dialog. This site is just getting underway and it looks like it will be quite good.
  • A very sophisticated system to detect "aliased" providers is now in place. An aliased provider is one who's news can be found via more than one URL. Perhaps one URL is direct and the other one is indirect. Basically, whenever any of the "Add xxx Providers..." buttons is pushed in the Providers tab of the Settings page, a special aliases file is downloaded from our web site. This file (which was built by hand) encodes all known aliased providers. The list is used to detect and eliminate duplicate providers that occur via aliasing. If you discover any more aliased (duplicate providers), please let us know so that we can augment our list.
  • When you upgrade to version 0.8.9 from a previous version, the aliased provider detection mechanism will be used to detect and eliminate any aliased providers. An additional check is made to detect and eliminate out-and-out duplication of providers that have the exact same URL (these were introduced by a bug in a previous version). 
  • You can now drop appropriate URLs on to the Main Window to automatically create new providers for them. Appropriate URLs will reference XML data in any of the formats that are acceptable to Headline Viewer. For example, you can drop the "Usenet" URLs from alchemy.openjava.org or any of the Network54 (?) URLs from www.xmltree.com. If you drop an URL that is already known to Headline Viewer, that provider is made active and then selected. The new provider will show "Dropped on to Headline Viewer" as its origin in the Settings Dialog.
  • The Provider List is now stored in an XML file in the user's Application Data directory. In previous versions it was stored in the registry. The first time version 0.8.9 is run it will migrate the settings from the registry to the XML file and then delete the settings from the registry. The XML-based format has several advantages. Performance is better since each provider used 18 registry keys. The external file opens the door to some other interesting possibilities including the ability to store the list of providers in a shared place somewhere on the web. The format of the file is expected to be stable but please let us know if you plan to write a program that depends on it. On a normal Windows NT installation The file will be stored in "C:\WINNT\Profiles\USER\Application Data" where USER is the name of the logged-in user. The file is named "providers.xml".
  • There is a new Behavior Setting, "Easy Move", which lets you move the Main Window by clicking and dragging in any unoccupied area. This option is enabled by default.
  • There is a new View option, "Always on Top." It can be set in the Settings Dialog and in the Context menu. Setting this option (it is off by default) causes Headline Viewer to "float" above all other windows. It is temporarily disabled when the Settings and About Dialogs are displayed.
  • The Settings Dialog now shows the number of providers and the number of active providers in a caption at the bottom of the dialog.
  • The "Load RSSMaker Providers" button is now named "Load StartsHere's Providers" to accomodate the change in the name of the site. The provider origin will now read "Loaded from theweb.startshere.net".
  • The Settings Dialog now includes a Statistics tab. This tab contains a list of all the active providers. For each provider the following information is listed:
  • The number of times that an attempt was made to read the provider's
    headlines.
  • The number of times these attempts were successful.
  • The elapsed time (in seconds) for the last successful attempt.

The average time (in seconds) for all of the successful attempts.

The tab also includes a checkbox to show the elapsed time for the most recent successful load as as tooltip on the Active Provider List in the Main Dialog as well as a Reset button to clear all of the statistics.

  • The Main Window can now be maximized.
  • The "Hot Tracking" option has been removed from the Settings dialog. It never worked right and could not be made to work right.
  • The program is now better at extracting content from RSS 0.91 files. There should be fewer occasions where valid files produce a seemingly empty set of articles. This happened when the file contained title and description fields, but the description was empty. The description is preferred over the title. The new behavior handles the case where the description is present, but empty.
  •  An image is now provided for the built-in SegFault.org provider, as well as for Floach and Tin Toys.
  • The status message issued after any of the "Add Providers" buttons has been pushed, and the providers loaded now includes the name of the provider (UserLand, StartsHere, xmlTree, or GrokSoup). 
  • Fixed a bug where RSS 0.91 files containing "item" entries without descriptions would repeat the most recent description instead of using the title as the description.
  • Fixed a bug where deleting a provider would cause a runtime error.
  • Fixed a bug where RSS-based providers would not work properly on the newest releases of Windows 2000.
  • Got rid of the irritating error message which happened when creating a new provider and typing in the Data URL.
  • Fixed a bug where the first provider name would sometimes be garbled with an extraneous "..." after opening and closing the Settings Dialog (B14).
  • Fixed a bug where user-entered providers were incorrectly tagged as being built-in to Headline Viewer.
  • The display is now refreshed more promptly when adding providers from RSSMaker or xmlTree.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the last item in the providers list from being moved up in the providers list in the Settings dialog.
  • The program executable no longer has an expiration date built in.
  • The provider count in the Settings dialog is now updated after the Add Default Providers button does its work.