Software update: RSSOwl 0.8b

RSSOwl version 0.8b has been released. This digital owl can fetch the latest news from various RSS, RDF and Atom feeds. News items can be looked up with the search function and thanks to the tabbed interface you can keep an overview of all the news on offer. Because the program is written in Java, it runs on Windows, MacOS X and Solaris, among others. The changelog announces the following changes:

Features:

• Changed the toolbar that is located right to the header “Favorites”:
  • Removed “New” and “Delete selected”
  • Added “Mark All Categories Read” to mark all favorites in RSSOwl read
  • Added “Aggregate All Categories” to view all favorites in one tab
  • Added “Reload All Categories” to reload all favorites in RSSOwl
  • Added “Search In All Categories” to search in all favorites

  Also updated the look with providing bigger icons that are easier to read

• Image in about dialog is now mouse-sensitive to open rssowl.org on click
• The parser will now set first 80 chars of description as title if the title tag is not given in the newsfeed XML document.
• New item added to the context menu on Categories and Subscription Folders: “Mark Category Read” will mark all favorites of the category and subcategories read. In addition, any favorites that are displayed in the tabfolder will update to mark all news read.
• New dialog to Create / Edit and View favorites. The dialog looks very similar to the preferences dialog. A tree on the left has two items “Preferences” and “Information” and changes its contents on the right when selecting one of it:

  In category “Information” you will see same contents as it was when selecting “Properties” on a favorite. It’s now more space to display the description in a multiline textarea.

  When selecting “Preferences” from the tree, the user is able to set URL, Title, Category, auto-update interval and some other settings at once. Those items are no longer placed into the context-menu of the favorite, making it smaller and therefore easier to handle. Also replaced the drop-down to select a category with a small dialog that displays all categories in a tree to select one from it.

• The dialog to select a browser / blogger executable will now automatically browser into the directory of the given executable, if one is already set
• Date and Time are now displayed in the correct format for the selected language. For example, the “Publish Date” column in newsfeeds always showed the german date and time format.
• In the case no channel infos are available for a newsfeed, no arrow will be displayed next to the newsfeed title.
• Whenever favorits with unread news are available, RSSOwl will change its System Tray icon to show the user (if the system tray icon is activated). The teasing trayicon is the owl with a big green arrow pointing from top to bottom
• News are now sorted on publish date per default if that information is available. In the case pubDate is not given, the feed is sorted by unread / read news.
• Updated few icons and splashscreen / aboutbanner
• New critical error feedback mechanism: Whenever a critical exception occurs that causes RSSOwl to crash a dialog will ask the user to send an error report. If he decides to send it, the mail application will open with some informations preset. The user is asked to attach the rssowllog.xml to that mail. The path to the log file is shown in the body text.
• It is now possible to set wether RSSOwl should display errors that occured while loading a newsfeed in a tab of the tabfolder. By default this option is set to true. Change this option to “View”.
• Enhanced System Tray settings for RSSOwl in “View”: It is now possible to let RSSOwl move to tray on startup and / or on exit automatically.
• Updated to latest SWT version 3.0 Milestone 9
• Updated sample favorites (now counting 111) and categories
• Eagerly awaited, and now finally available: Drag and Drop support implemented to the tree holding favorites to move favorites, categories and subscriptions from one category into another. Also added drag and drop to the tab folder. This allows you to drag a tab that displays a newsfeed into the favorites tree to create a new favorite with the URL and Title of the dragged newsfeed.
• New option “Display newsfeeds in tabs” in “View” preferences to set wether RSSOwl should use tabs to display newsfeeds (or other content, for example a browser window). This option is set to TRUE using default settings.
• It is now possible to specify arguments to the external browser that RSSOwl should use. Use the [URL] wildcard to place the URL anywhere within the argument statement. This for example allows to let Mozilla open a new tab for a link if a session is running (argument: -remote (openURL [URL], new tab)). Note: If the arguments are left blank, RSSOwl will per default simply append the URL to the end of the executable with a leading space.
• Some cleanups in the preferences dialog
• New option “Set focus on new tabs” in “View” preferences to set wether new tabs that open in the tabfolder should gain focus automatically or not (true by default). Nevertheless, when this option is set to false but only one tab is visible in the tabfolder it will gain focus. First tab items always get focused in the tabfolder.
• New “Validate Newsfeed” dialog implemented (located in “Tools”). Enter the URL to a newsfeed or select a local file to have it validated against most common formats (0.91, 0.92, 2.0) or any DTD that is set in the document (simply use “Override Doctype Declaration” to override the DTD if existing) . Its also possible to let RSSOwl automatically detect the format. Errors and Warnings are displayed in a table with a detailed description and the line number of the problem. This feature is experimental and will most likely be updated upon user feedback in future versions.
• Moved “Import From OPML” and “Export To OPML” into the “File” Menu. The export and import of settings moved into the Preferences dialog
• Extended OPML export with adding “owerName” and “type” as attributes to the outline

Internationalization:

• New language Bengali (thanks to Omi Azad)
• New language Korean (thanks to Geon Goo)
• New language Polish (thanks to Ryszard Sierotnik)
• Fixed some malformed translations

Bug fixes:

• About dialog title showed “RSSOwl” twice
• When aggregating categories the “Re-Load newsfeeds from source” setting was not taken into consideration
• The archive to remember read news was not recognizing news that used the Guid as link
• Some languages ​​missed localized long dateformats for the statusline
• Input textarea for NewsTip body format did not wrap lines
• The dialogs “Search Newsfeeds” and “Properties of favorite” will now close on ESC key pressed and show as internal window of the main window. When minimizing those wont create a new entry in the taskbar, but move to bottom-left
• Some colors where not disposed on application exit
• When right-clicking on a news in the newsheader table, the news was displayed as if selected with a left-click. Now, news will only be displayed and marked read when left-clicking on a news. This finally allows to work with that context menu when “Open each newsfeed in browser” or “Open each empty newsfeed in browser” is activated.
• Moving favorites from one category to another erased all settings such as “Open on startup” and the auto-update intervall. The settings are now kept after moving the favorite
• First tab in the tabfolder had curved top-left corner which looked ugly
• If the guid element was given in a newsitem and the link empty, it was displayed as link in the news area. This is now restricted to only display the guid as link if it is a valid URL.
• Rating a newsitem with AmphetaRate, the guid was used as link if the link element was empty. This is now restricted to only use the guid as link if it is a valid URL
• Linux: Critical gtkselection.c bug fixed on empty text-selection
• Selecting “Minimize RSSOwl” when “Minimize to Tray” is not checked (or not available on the OS) will now simply minimize the window instead of hiding it and displaying a small floating Owl-Icon. That icon was not positioned correctly on OS other than windows. Also the support for Tray-Icon will soon be extended to Mac OS X, thus making the floating Owl-Icon superfluos.
• Performing “Minimize RSSOwl” made RSSOwl crash if the “Minimize to Tray” option was not checked.
• If a proxy was set in RSSOwl, it was not used when loading newsfeeds which where not saved as favorites
• Error tabs were not selected correctly in the tabfolder on erroneus automatic updates
• RSSOwl crashed when reloading a newsfeed that is no longer accessable, for example reloading an online feed after going offline
• The logger file “rssowllog.xml” was emptied every time RSSOwl started. Changed output to simple format (no XML anymore) into new file “rssowllog.log”. This file gets filled until it reaches 100kb. After that size the file is emptied and again gets filled from the beginning. The format of log_critical logfiles was also changed to simple format.
• Changing fonts did not update all GUI components. The result was for example very big fonts being cut off when overlapping out of controls
• RSSOwl crashed when the internal browser was calling the JavaScript close() method. Now, the tab displaying that page will close on this event
• AmphetaRate rating submission failed when rating a newsitem that contained a GUID as element, which had whitespaces (new-line char) around
• No Font was set on the status line components. Applied the “Dialog” font.
• When aggregating an entire category, the “Newsfeed” column displayed the title of the newsfeed rather then displaying the title from the connected favorite
• Made RSSOwl more robust to exceptions that may occur when closing RSSOwl while a thread is working in the background and updating the UI
• Changed wrong outline attribute “title” to “text” in exported OPML files
• Fonts loaded from the user.xml are now using selected locale
• Linux: Selecting “Close” from popup on empty tabfolder caused crash
• Linux: Context menu on tabs closed directly after opening
• Win32: Autostart entry was not removed upon uninstallation
• #952539 Does not remember read newsheaders b/w invokations
• #958514 When clicking on a column the layout defaults. Newsheader table is now remembering the column-sizes set by the user after sorting by a column
• #961148 “Open Selected News in Browser Automatically” crashes 0.73b

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