SharpReader 0.9.5.0 is now available at sharpreader.net.
Changes since the last version are:
Yo, Luke, excellent, thanks for fixing the 'remembering' issues. And the mouse wheel focus too. When is 1.0?
Posted by BillSaysThis at July 19, 2004 10:48 PMBlast! I still cannot view http-auth feeds from LiveJournal. It's the one thing preventing me from fully switching over to SharpReader - I can't read posts from LJ that are marked "friends only". Help! :)
Posted by B.K. DeLong at July 19, 2004 10:50 PMInstalled!
One thing I'd still like is a total unread-count in the hint when I hover over the tray icon. Save me from restoring the window if there are no unread items.
Posted by mabster at July 19, 2004 11:17 PMRead/unread counts in subscriptions-pane in blue (like outlook).
This contrasts way too harshly on my screen. Is there anyway we could change the color back? I liked it black.
Nice work on all the other stuff, though.
Posted by SharpReaderUser at July 19, 2004 11:35 PMWould be nice if the unread counts were only in blue if there were unread items and black otherwise. But, given the comments above it might be nice if it was configurable.
I also second the issue with http-auth feeds. It would be nice if a username/password (already hashed) could be set for each feed in the feed properties so it doesn't need to be entered each time.
Posted by AnotherUser at July 20, 2004 1:14 AMIs it just me, or has the little sort arrow on the list view headers changed into a rather unhelpful square?
Posted by Matt Ellis at July 20, 2004 3:34 AMNew version of SharpReader
A new version of SharpReader, 0.9.5.0, is available for download. Luke blogs about the changes in this version.
Nice news! But what do you think about rss authentication, do you plan this option?
Posted by webzee at July 20, 2004 8:53 AMCounts: The difference is that Outlook doesn't show them if there's none unread. Personally, it's only been a few hours and I'm really getting to dislike the blue numbers...
Matt Ellis: Just you, I'm afraid! No problems here! :-)
Luke,
Whenever I minimize and restore the Sharpreader window, the title column becomes smaller and partly hidden behind the Date column. Anyone else have this problem ? Thanks.
Posted by ColumbiaPike at July 20, 2004 10:31 AMGenerally I like the new improvements. Especially the 'send as email' option. One question about it though. I use Outlook. And the messages appear addressed to a@b.com. Where is this address coming from and can I chage it? My google-fu does not appear to be working and it is not listed in the registry anywhere so I can find it.
Also, a feature request. I always keep SharpReader in an 'Unread Only' filter with a reverse sort on the date. I have to apply these settings every time I open the program. I would like to request an option for SharpReader to remember these settings from session to session.
Thanks and a great program!
Posted by Patrick at July 20, 2004 10:52 AMSharpReader Update 0.9.5.0
I personally use SharpReader to read my syndicated feeds.
To download or read more about the latest version of SharpReader visit:
SharpReader.net
(via public virtual MemoryStream)
I love SharpReader. I use it throughout the day.
Comments about the upgrade:
Like the send as email option.
Like the mouse scroll fix.
Don't like the blue numbers. It's harder to (quickly) view what blogs have unread items. I like the suggestions above about it being configurable.
Don't like to restore the window to find that no unread items are there. Sometimes, the tray icon turns yellow (indicating new posts), so I double-click (to restore the window) to find no unread items. It would be nice to have the icon not turn yellow at all (why does it do that anyway?) or have an unread item count appear on mouse hover in the tray icon.
Thanks for a great program!!
Posted by Brian Manchester at July 20, 2004 11:11 AMHas anyone else seen an issue that when moving your mouse over the Feeds pane, your desktop icons keep repainting? Pretty sure that wasn't there with the previous version.
Posted by Mike at July 20, 2004 11:35 AM"MouseWheel now scrolls control over which mouse is hovering, instead of the focused control."
Yay! :)
I agree with the comments above regarding the coloring of the # of items. Outlook uses the following system: (#) in blue for the number of unread items, [#] in green for the number of items and the folder in bold if there are items in there for which any of the two # options from above are shown. So both blue and green (+ bold) alert you, but for different reasons.
Your system is very different as for the numbering system and is not like Outlook at all. It seems like every feed is alerting you now, which is kind of pointless and makes it harder to concentrate on the rest. So it would be nice if you could make it configurable, maybe incorporating the Outlook idea in the same way.
I don't see any new icon for SharpReader btw??
Posted by Arnoud at July 20, 2004 12:34 PMScrolling with mouse wheel fix is real nice. I have explorer mouse with buttons that in a browser trigger back and forward browse. They don't work in the browser window of SharpReader. That doesn't stop me from using it though. KUTGW.
Posted by Dave at July 20, 2004 4:15 PMSharpReader more sharp now!
SharpReader, the great free RSS Aggregator software by Luke Hutteman is more sharp now. :D As of now, the v0.9.5.0 is available for free download at http://www.sharpreader.net/. I've been using v0.9.4.0 till yet & haven't upgraded to v0....
Yes! Flags! You rule! :D
I just want to make one more request: Import/export. If I move to a new computer or format my drive, I want to be able to back up all of the history.
How about it? :)
I have a small issue with sharpreader.. I use firefox as default browser.
I use a feed that shows special posts from a forum.. when the forum page is shown in the preview window and i click on a link an externam IE and an external Firefox windows is opend and shows that page.
Posted by dafire at July 20, 2004 6:04 PMdafire: this is a Firefox bug - see this weblog entry for more information and instructions on how to fix it.
Posted by Luke Hutteman at July 20, 2004 9:22 PMRight. I've been doing some dead scientific stuff to figure out what's going on with the little sort arrows. Turns out, it's all to do with the font. I normally use Verdana, and that displays a nasty little square. As in fact do Tahoma, Arial, Microsoft Sans Serif, and just about every other font I've tried, apart from Times and Arial Unicode MS, which gives me the proper arrow.
What fonts are people using?
PS. I'm on Windows XP, and have a colleague who is getting exactly the same results.
Posted by Matt Ellis at July 21, 2004 3:14 AMI really like the "Always copy IE proxy settings on startup", It now works even when IE uses autoconfig. Great!
Now there is only one thing left to request (at least for me), the ability to share (part of) the news feeds with others, or other locations. Being able to save the feeds to a file in the current version is a good start, but I would like some more options.
If I could save (part of) the list of feeds to an FTP site, SharpReader could read the list on startup, from file, FTP and from a web site. With this, I can use Sharpreader both on my laptop and my stationary PC, and also share news feeds with colleagues, without having to manually copy each feed.
Wow, looks like it is somewhat faster also?, looks like the navigation is abit faster.
But, there is still an bug when you have lots of fees, I have about 900 feeds, and after some hours all feeds will have the refresh symbol on them and it will never be done, I have to close it down, and open it again.
Still uses lot's of memory, but closer to 500MB now, before it was about 700-800MB, could be other factors playing in there though.
If you really need correct emailadresses in comments, could you please mask them out when viewing this blog/comments? (got enough spam already..)
Posted by AsbjornM at July 21, 2004 11:06 AMAsbjornM: While I cannot take credit for any navigation-speed/memory-usage improvements you may have noticed, I did think the refresh-hangs with lots of feeds should be fixed now (they were in my testing anyway) - if you're still experiencing this, could you email me your opml-file so I can see if I can reproduce this on my system? - thanks.
Regarding the email issue, MovableType masks them through HTML entities - if you do a "view-source", you'll see the it looks like mailto:user@domain.net. According to this article, entity-encoding provides a good protection against email harvesters. It was written over a year ago though; not sure if things have changed since then. I changed the email address on your comments to give you some extra protection.
***
Is this normal my security system notices me that SharpReader wants to listen to ports...???
By default, SharpReader listens on port 5335 for clicks on radio userland subscribe buttons (those cactus xml icons often seen on radio.weblogs.com). You can deny SharpReader this access without any problems, or turn this feature off altogether from SharpReader through the "listen on port 5335" checkbox under Tools|Options.
Posted by Luke Hutteman at July 21, 2004 9:39 PMSweet! I always love to see a new version of SharpReader. It just gets better every time. I love some of the new features and fixes - especially the new color for the feed (total/unread) and the fact that it remembers the tree state. Awesome job.
Mine still locks up on feeds after a couple days. No big deal since I can close and reopen it but I thought you'd want to know since that's one of the things you fixed.
Posted by Steve Hiner at July 23, 2004 6:07 PMre: encoding email addresses: http://willmaster.com/possibilities/demo/RetrieveEmails.cgi (when Zeldman first heard about using numeric character entities, I remember someone writing a script to harvest them in half an hour, and that's not someone who was getting paid based on how well they can harvest email addresses).
I'm afraid that since there's no safe way (if I wrote a spambot, I'd also strip 'nospam', 'removethis', and all all-cap bits from anything I harvested, and even the Javascript I use to write email links in out-of-order pieces has been spammed a couple of times, though possibly by hand (me, I'd just use the Mozilla Javascript engine)), the only safe and reasonable thing to do is use <$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$>. So many people now require-but-never-show with email that it's reasonable for commenters to expect that.
Posted by Phil Ringnalda at July 27, 2004 2:28 AMPhil: as usual, you're absolutely right.
I just changed my templates to keep the email-address hidden at all times.
Our site gets hit all the time by harvesters. I changed all of our email addresses and then obfuscated the new ones using Enkoderform. Common addresses, such as webmaster and mail are aliased to a junkmail account, that I occasionally check. Anyways, Enkoderform has stopped the harvesting of our real addresses. It does the java thing, but goes way beyond what any other program does. The javascript actually needs to be run in order to get an address, you cant simply parse the code. So, we're safe until the harvesters start processing javascript.
Posted by Joe Edmon at August 8, 2004 8:36 AM1) support for IE cookies - if I login to a web site and keep a persistent cookie for it, it'd be nice if SharpReader included said cookie(s) in requests so things like lj_friends.cgi would not be needed
http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/WWW-Mechanize-0.73_02/lib/WWW/Mechanize/Examples.pod
2) "go to next unread/modified" - sometimes I'm in a feed that I have hundreds of entries from and SharpReader tells me there are 2 more unread, but they're modified somewhere in the feed, someone updated a post from 3 days ago, so I have to scroll down and scan for bold. The mail reader mutt has the tab key for "go to next unread" and such functionality would be very helpful
Posted by FlatReader at August 22, 2004 10:57 AMi love sharpreader in general but - as some other people stated above - after only 5 minutes with the new version I'm already really annoyed about the blue colour behind the feeds..
any way you could make that optional?
keep up the great work!
Posted by adara at August 23, 2004 5:14 AM