Month: November 2003

I’ve just added two new FeedDemon newsgroups to the news.bradsoft.com news server:

The feeddemon.user.feeds newsgroup is where FeedDemon users can recommend RSS feeds to each other, and feeddemon.user.styles is where FeedDemon users can share their custom newspaper styles.

Note that while I will read every message posted to these groups, they aren’t intended for FeedDemon technical support. Once FeedDemon has been released, a separate tech support group will be created.

PS: Depending on your newsreader, you may have to reset your list of newsgroups for the new groups to appear.

FeedDemon 1.0 Release Candidate 3 is now available. Be sure to read the release notes before installing RC3.

Unless major problems are found, this will be the last RC before the final release (finally!).

As many of you have guessed by now, developing FeedDemon has taken considerably longer than expected. The reasons for this are many, but by far the largest cause is simply the fact that FeedDemon exposed me to a number of things I’ve never had to deal with before – such as Unicode support, XML parsing and multi-threaded HTTP. Funny thing is, I’m glad to have had the chance to work on so much new stuff, and I look forward to diving into a whole lot more with future versions.

Lately I’ve had some requests to enable using Mozilla inside FeedDemon, and I’d like to address this here. The short answer is that I would like to include Mozilla as an option, but past experience with TopStyle has taught me that it’s too much of a support burden. Now the long answer…

TopStyle was one of the first (if not the first) commercial products to embed Mozilla’s “Gecko” rendering engine, which enabled viewing web pages side-by-side in IE and Mozilla (see this page for a screenshot of this feature in action). TopStyle relies on Adam Locke’s Mozilla ActiveX control for this feature, and he should be commended for the great job he’s done. My rant here isn’t about Adam’s excellent work, but instead about the poor way in which this control is included with Mozilla.

Even though this ActiveX control is installed with Mozilla, it’s not registered, which means that it doesn’t exist as far as Windows is concerned. I couldn’t have TopStyle automatically register it since the steps to do so have changed considerably over time, so customers have had to register it themselves.

As visitors to my newsgroups can attest, there have been countless support questions from people trying to get Mozilla to work inside TopStyle. All too often, the problem is due to changes in the latest Mozilla build which renders it inoperable inside TopStyle (as well as inside other programs which support Mozilla, such as HomeSite). Mozilla 1.4 builds were a good example – not only was the control moved, but it also required downloading a “supplemental zip file” to get it to work. And I used to own a computer on which TopStyle’s Mozilla preview never worked after I installed a new Mozilla build. If I can’t figure it out, how can I expect my customers to? They have better things to do.

TopStyle is a web authoring tool, so I can accept the additional support burden since web authors need an easy way to check their work in different browsers. FeedDemon, on the other hand, is an RSS reader, so offering Mozilla as an internal previewer doesn’t justify the support costs.

My hope is that the Mozilla team will realize the importance of the ActiveX control and take care of these issues so that developers such as myself can rely on it. As it stands now, though, FeedDemon will have to rely solely on Internet Explorer for internal previewing.

PS: Just in case you were wondering, other browsers – such as Opera – can’t be embedded in software the way that Mozilla and IE can.