fondantfancies.com

• I've ditched calling feeds "channels". 6 years ago hardly anyone knew what a "feed" was, and it's a horrible sounding word, so I decided to use something else. Now it's time to conform.
• I've redesigned the New Channel Subscribe to Feed window to make it much easier to use. Just enter any old address and it'll figure out whether it's a feed or a web page and do the right thing.
• It's now impossible to set the title column widths wider than the pane they're contained in, which makes it super-mega-easy to make them exactly the same width, which is what 99% of people want, by dragging them as wide as they'll go.
• I've added an option to the preferences to ask to be notified of beta versions by Shrook's auto-update feature. If you're interested in getting releases a little more often and new features and bug-fixes a little earlier, there's no harm in setting it.
• I've tweaked the look of the main window slightly to get further away from the now-retro brushed metal appearance.

I've got confirmation that Shrook for iPhone has made it through the App Store review process and will appear on the store some time tomorrow is available now. Here's a few things you might need to know about:

• After installing but before you run it for the first time, go to the Settings application, scroll to the bottom, select Shrook and enter your shrook.com username and password.
• There's a demo mode if you don't have a shrook.com account. Fire up Shrook without a username set in the Settings, and it'll create a temporary guest account on the shrook.com server. It comes pre-loaded with a selection of channels from the Channel Guide, and you can use it just like it was your own account, to see how everything works.
• The only bit of the user interface that needs explanation is the items list. If you touch the main part of an item, it'll show you the item text. If you touch the blue circular arrow button alongside, it'll show you the web page associated with that item.

I've now released Shrook v2.65, which is essentially a patch for some issues users experienced in v2.64:

• Preferences corruption bug, which caused the rightmost pane not to load, amongst other weirdness.
• Dock icon bug when running on Tiger
• Channel Guide display bug
• Adds a manual "Check for Updates" menu option

Otherwise, download it from the Shrook page.

Sorry about this. Clearly I need to do better quality control.

I've just released Shrook v2.64.

• The biggest new feature is Sparkle, the automatic updating system that installs updates for you. That means this is the last update you'll have to install manually.
• I've beefed up the code that cleans up XML before processing, which means things like malformed Unicode byte sequences and misplaced ampersands won't break the feed in Shrook any more.
• You can now press the right arrow key to trigger expanding the item pane. Press the left arrow key twice to collapse it again.
• There's a new option "Ignore timestamps for sorting" in the Configure tab of the Get Info window. Enable this on feeds with dodgy timestamps (especially future dated), and they'll no longer mess up your listings.
• There was a crash that would happen when you tried to use the space bar to jump to the next unread item when there weren't any, under certain circumstances. That's now fixed.
• The UI freezing problem when clicking between channels and items should now be completely fixed.

I've just crossed the last item off the to-do list for the iPhone version of Shrook. It'll be on the App Store very soon.

It will be a free download, but you'll need a shrook.com account since it's dependent on the server for its data.

Update: If all goes well with the App Store review process it will be available on Monday.

The most important one was to fix the freezing bug that many users were experiencing. This appears to have been caused by a new auto-tooltip feature introduced in Leopard. The idea is when you hover over an item in a table that's too long to fit the cell, a tooltip will appear showing the full text. Suddenly eing asked to draw the cell contents in a tooltip window rather than the table itself confused my code, sometimes leading to a freeze.

I've fixed the bug and have the tooltip feature working. Currently it's only for item titles, but support for showing the text of items will come later.

I've also made it so that if you hit the delete key while viewing a channel within a smart group, it'll offer you the option of unsubscribing, rather than just beeping. Within ordinary groups I've redesigned the delete dialog to be easier to use. Finally, you can hit delete on the Channel Guide to get rid of it.

Leopard got rid of brushed metal from the Shrook window background, and this release removes some of the associated chrome, in particular the border around the main panes, and the embossing effect on the status text at the bottom.

In v2.61 I made Shrook reregister with Growl more often. Not only was it too often, but it caused a weird bug in X11 apps that stole the window focus. It should only reregister very occasionally now.

Finally it fixes an address corruption bug several people reported, makes the left arrow key work properly when you're viewing a web page, and fixes some bugs with column resizing.

If you don't already have it, a download link is on the Shrook page.