2011-12-20 12:20:00
Hello again. It's been awhile, but this time hasn't been wasted. You can see in the Git log that progress is still being made. Of course, the age old open source trouble of having real work get in the way has reared its ugly head, but lately the changes have been mostly under the covers.
Among them are a massive drawing improvement that means that the most complex format strings with thousands of stories will still be rendered snappily, and as a few days ago the interface becomes informative and usable much faster. The plugin infrastructure has grown to be more robust, and I'm using it every day to include more interesting information in my Reddit feeds. JSON is being used for the entirety of the disk presence (config) and the protocol, so the daemon and client should be more interoperable with programs written across the spectrum of languages.
The visible improvements mostly include the ability to manipulate your feeds from inside the interface. Things like changing tag order, adding tags, using tags like folders. Also, adding, listing, and deleting feeds. Keybinds are now handled (queried/set) easily through the interface. The ability to change themes and colors on the fly is there too, if a bit rough at the moment. Theres also the ability to address ranges of items abstractly to say, "set all items in this tag, above my cursor read". OPML support and passworded feeds have been implemented for quite awhile.
I'm posting this because I'm currently slogging through the documentation
on a Wordpress installation elsewhere on codezen. I'm taking the approach
of adding polish as I document so it's less "document what I've done" and
more "document how I'd like it to work and then make it work that way."
This was the cause of the bind interface showing up, and now
it's the cause of the color code being simplified.
Having improved the codebase and ironed out many of the bugs, we're still left with the following TODO:
- Documentation
- Polish
- Reader content support
As you can see these were resident on the previous list as welll, but I think that's understandable considering documentation and polish are ongoing as the interface continues.
Reader content support (i.e. more intelligent downloading) should be trivial, but I'm not sure whether it should be done as built in functionality or with a plugin.
Anyway, that's what's up on the Canto front. I'm off at the end of the week for the holidays, so I'd like to make better progress than I've been able to in quite awhile.
-Jack