News about GreatNews

Build 368 and GreatNews road map

GreatNews — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 03:32:27 +0000

Despite of usual distraction of spring time Build 368 is out on time! Thanks to the fine folks from Zountry, GreatNews BlogThis tool now supports generic external tools for various tasks. To setup Zountry with GreatNews, please follow these simple steps. There are also many small usability enhancements like marking read/unread directly on reading pane, using quoted keyword in news watch, etc. This version has been released as nightly build for a while. I’m quite confident in its stability.

I spent some time early this month reviewing GreatNews issue tracking database. As you can imagine there are numerous feature requests and bug fixes. To prioritize tasks a little bit, I feel new functions in the following 3 categories should be implemented first:

Prioritize channels both automatically and manually
RSS enclosure(like podcasting) download and management
Offline reading and archiving capacity.

Stay tuned. GreaterNews is coming!

GreatNews Language Pack Editor

GreatNews — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 04:14:32 +0000

I cannot express enough how much I appreciate your efforts in translating GreatNews. So I think at least I can help making language pack update a little bit easier. GreatNews Language Pack Editor is now available. With Build 365 English language pack has been updated to match the latest code.

To update a language pack, download build 365, start GreatNewsLngEditor.exe. Use File->Open Left to open gn_eng.ini, then use File->Open Right to open another language pack. The difference will be highlighted. Use Edit->Copy all new entries to right to duplicate new entries to right side.
To create a new language pack, make a copy of gn_eng.ini, then translate the copy.

Updated Build 364

GreatNews — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 03:25:46 +0000

Shortly after Build 364 was published to public beta area, several users reported this build handles certain web links incorrectly when middle clicked on. I have put a new build 364 onto the server. The size of GreatNews.exe in this build is 1,400,832 bytes and was built at 3/3/2006 12:16AM.

If you find GreatNews can’t display some web pages on new tabs, please download and install Build 364 again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

GreatNews keyboard shortcuts

GreatNews — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:45:36 +0000

Michael Kizer posted a list of GreatNews keybord shortcuts. I thought this might be useful for other users too. Here’s an updated list:

In channel tree:

F2 to rename a channel/group/watch/label directly on the tree
Ctrl+click to switch channel w/o marking previous one as read

In news list:

Ctrl + ENTER to open web page in new tab
Shift + ENTER to open web page in external browser
Mouse wheel click to open web page in current tab
ENTER to open web page in current tab
Double click to open article according to settings.

In reading pane:

Ctrl+S to save current web page
Ctrl+N to open current internet page in default browser
Ctrl+F to find text on current page
Ctrl+click to open link in new tab
Shift+click to open link in external browser
Ctrl+PageUp/Down to turn to previous/next page
Ctrl+Tab to switch among tabs
Ctrl+W / Ctrl+F4 to close a tab
SPACE Bar will scroll, goto next page, go to next item etc depending on what you are reading. Scrolling mouse wheel at page bottom or scrolling mouse wheel holding right button works similiarly.

In menus:

Ctrl+F - find text on this page
Ctrl+H - search news item
F3 - search next
Ctrl+T - new tab
F12 - maximize reading pane
F7 - Next unread channel
F8 - next unread group

Navigation:

Tab/Shift+Tab to navigate among panels

GreatNews plugin interface

GreatNews — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 01:24:00 +0000

GreatNews build 362 can use plugins to extend BlogThis funciton. A sample plugin to support w.bloggar is included with default installation. The source code of this sample is available here.

GreatNews plugins are regular windows dlls that export the following two functions:

LPCTSTR GetGreatNewsPluginName();
void BlogThis(LPCTSTR itemXml, LPCTSTR options);

where LPCTSTR itemXml is the news item and its channel in rss 2.0 format, and LPCTSTR options is the URL parameter set in BlogThis configuration dialog.

Very simple, right?

Tracking comments in GreatNews

GreatNews — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:26:50 +0000

In case you don’t read release notes(I myself usually don’t…), GreatNews build 354 added ability to track comments automatically. If an article has comment feed, GreatNews will show “Track Comments” link like this:

If you click the link, GreatNews will start monitoring the article, and mark it as unread when new comments posted.

This function is enabled for new users by default. If you upgraded from previous version, you can enable it in Tools->Options->Features.

Enjoy!

Upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0

GreatNews — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 16:38:25 +0000

Simply one of the smoothest upgrading experience I had. No tricky steps, no surprises, it just worked… Folks at WordPress did an excellent job on this.<

Happy New Year!

GreatNews — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:45:27 +0000

2005 was an eventful year for me. But everything turned out to be pretty good. Looking forward to a great 2006!

I wish you all a happy new year!

(GreatNews users, how about leaving a comment in your native language? I know you are from more than 60 countries! )

Greg Duncan comments on GreatNews

GreatNews — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 01:26:58 +0000

Greg discovered GreatNews a week ago. And he still likes it after a week’s use…

RSS Poll

GreatNews — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 02:03:56 +0000

Randy Charles Morin over KBCafe is doing a rss usage poll. The numbers more or less confirmed what I always guessed, that a lot of rss users are reading 100+ channels regularly (try that with a plain browser!).

How to upgrade GreatNews

GreatNews — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:47:06 +0000

If you use GreatNewsSetup.exe before, please download the newer GreatNewsSetup.exe and run the setup.
If you use GreatNews.zip before, please download the newer GreatNews.zip and unzip to your existing greatnews directory, overwrite existing files when prompted to.

Both GreatNewsSetup.exe and GreatNews.zip will keep your subscriptions, and will upgrade them to new data formats automatically if necessary.

Einstein’s todo list

GreatNews — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 05:29:31 +0000

Highly recommended!

http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php

GreatNews new public beta

GreatNews — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:53:40 +0000

A new version of GreatNews is out with a long list of updates!

The new features include new statistics reports, security enhancements, reminder of inactive channels and a lot of other stuff. This public beta is definitely the best GreatNews version to date.

To zip file users, now GreatNews.zip can be used for upgrading too. Just unzip the files to your local GreatNews directory. There’s no more GreatNews_upgrade.zip.

Lazy blog

GreatNews — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:44:03 +0000

Nightly build 338 includes new statistics reports that show blog activities.(Under Tools->Channel Statistics) It’s kinda embarrassing to find this blog among the least active blog in last 60 days among my subscriptions…

The most-active-blog report is less informative because major news sites like CNN and Yahoo occupy most slots. It would be more useful if I can find a way to tell who’re the individual bloggers and only include them in the statistics. Maybe add a threshold that excludes sites publishing more than 10 items a day?

New install or upgrade?

GreatNews — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 22:27:00 +0000

Yesterday I got a chance to check last week’s server log: 10K+ downloads in a week because of the new public beta. Not bad for a tiny rss reader in a crowded market, especially considering I hasn’t published it on any download sites like CNET or Tucows. Thank you everyone who helped spreading GreatNews!

One thing in the log surprised me is that 52.7% of downloads are for GreatNews.zip. I thought most downloads are to upgrade from previous versions, and user would have downloaded much more setup_unicode.exe or GreatNews_upgrade.zip. No wonder I keep getting emails complaining channels disappeared after upgrade….

I guess having two zip files is too confusing for average users. I’m going to change GreatNews in upcoming build 336 so that a single zip file can be used for both new install and upgrade . Hopefully when next beta is released, nobody suffers losing channel subscription again.

Google Blog Search (updated)

GreatNews — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:44:23 +0000

It seems every tech-related blog mentioned Google Blog Search one way or another today. For fun I added Google Blog Search to GreatNews search channel list in nightly build 331, so I can have an excuse to talk about it too!

Randy showed a trick to track links to your blog through google blog search. For example, to track links to my site, I added a new search channel, select “Google Blog Search”, and set keyword to link:curiostudio.com. Works great!

Update: I added “Google Blog Search By Date” in Build 333. The link tracking works even better this way…

How to integrate FireFox live bookmark

GreatNews — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 02:01:41 +0000

Two easy steps:

Install FireFox extension Feed Your Reader
In GreatNews Tools->Options dialog, click the button [Set GreatNews as the default feed aggregator].

Now if you click Live Bookmark icon in FireFox, the feed will be subscribed in GreatNews.

News window or new tab?

GreatNews — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 13:50:01 +0000

The new tab function in build 326 caused some confusion in when GreatNews opens new browser window and when opens a new tab. GreatNews works this way:

By default, clicking a rss link will open the link in the same tab. SHIFT+Click will open in new browser window. Middle-click will open in new tab.
If “open rss link in external browser” option was selected, clicking a rss link will always open in new window.
If “disable tabbed browsing” option was selected, all new tab functions will open in new window instead.

Hope this can clarify some confusions.

Hello World!

GreatNews — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 04:09:47 +0000

Growing rapidly since alpha launch in January, GreatNews today has thousands of users from more than 60 countries/regions around the world. Here are the top 15:

China	37.4%
United States	21.6%
Australia	4.0%
Taiwan	3.9%
United Kingdom	3.8%
Canada	3.6%
France	3.3%
Germany	3.1%
Spain	2.3%
Japan	2.2%
Korea	1.3%
Hong Kong	1.0%
Belgium	0.9%
Italy	0.9%
Chile	0.8%
Total:	90.1%