Small Software

SmallNews 2.2

2010-08-10T20:28:18+00:00

SmallNews 2.2 is available for download. The main new feature in this release is a new way of selecting which PDF formats are created. Instead of a whole load of tick boxes, you now select the versions you want to create, and specify a prefix for the output filename of each.

The date is appended onto each filename. Obviously, each format should have a different prefix, or they will get overwritten.
There are 5 PDF formats available:

Print (A4 page) - 1 columns (this is a new option)
Print (A4 page) - 3 columns (the previous default)
iPad
iPhone / iPod Touch
6" ebook reader (e.g. Kindle, Sony Reader)

It is now also much easier for me to add new PDF formats to the list, so if you have a particular request, let me know.

For any of the PDF versions to be created, you must have Prince XML installed (as before).

This version also includes a major overhaul to the way site-specific handlers work. There isn't much to see at the moment, but this will make it a lot easier to add new handlers - this with be the focus of the next release.

A few minor changes to the handlers have been made:

Removed handler for The Times (as it has gone behind a paywall)
Added a handler for the new BBC News design (news and sport feeds from the BBC are now handled differently, as they have different formats)

Finally, there is a new "Test selected" button on the Feeds page which enables the feed selected from the list to be tested independently. This is like the test option on the Settings page, but removes the need for cutting and pasting the feed. This is useful in checking how well a particular feed is handled, without running through the entire creation process.

SmallNews and the new Amazon Kindle

2010-08-04T11:11:07+00:00

Despite it's dominance of the US eBook market, I've always been rather cool towards the Amazon Kindle. Several reasons for this:

Amazon never did a "proper" international launch - you had to order direct from the US, which seemed bizarre given the size of Amazon's operations in UK and Europe. There was also no UK/European book store.
I felt it was too much of a closed platform, only capable of reading books from Amazon in their own format, whereas other readers had much better format capability (this has improved over time though). There was also that fiasco with books being deleted from users' devices without their approval.
I always thought they were rather ugly - much less attractive than the Sony Reader.
It always felt a bit too expensive.

The recent launch of the new model has gone a long way to addressing many of my reservations. The new model is significantly cheaper, sold direct from the UK, with an new UK store imminent. And the addition of Wifi support means there appears to be a simple and free way of getting "personal documents" onto the Kindle. So it seems to me that a SmallNews PDF ought to work quite well as a "personal document". So I think I'm going to buy one, and add a feature to SmallNews that allows the created PDF to be emailed to specified address. It's my understanding that this is the easiest way to get a PDF to a Kindle without plugging it in to your computer - email it to your @free.kindle.com address.

It will be September before I get a Kindle to test it on, so I'll release an update then.

UPDATE: I notice that the new UK Kindle book store is now open, somewhat ahead of schedule. But I'm appalled at how small the price difference between paperback books and eBooks is - typically about just 40p, which is less than the cost of the (free) postage. However, a part of this is the (equally surprising) fact that you have to pay VAT on eBooks, but not printed books. Where is the sense in that?

get_iplayer 2.78

2010-06-05T20:47:06+00:00

Although get_iplayer was dropped by its author around 3 months ago, until recently it had continued to work. But a change on iPlayer a couple of weeks stopped it working. Luckily, several people have taken it upon themselves to continue to maintain the code. One of these seems to have turned into a project to entirely rewrite it (which seems rather unnecessary), but another has successfully fixed the problems caused by the recent changes.

So get_iplayer v2.78 is now available, which is fantastic news. There is also a Windows installer which gets all the necessary supporting applications, although I've never tried this (don't have any Windows machines any more).

I've also noticed that the iPlayer Downloader app Christine Caulfield built on top of get_iplayer has also been removed. This is a shame, because it's very much my favourite way of using get_iplayer. But the good news is that if you substitute the latest version of get_iplayer into the package, it still works.

SmallNews 2.1

2010-06-04T20:57:00+00:00

SmallNews 2.1 is available for download. This has two changes since v2.01:

Added the option to create an iPad-optimized PDF file
Fixed a bug which prevented ePub working on MacOSX 10.5 (Leopard)

I've been using my iPad to read the news for over a month now and have observed a couple of things.

Yes, it a very nice device to read news directly from the newspaper web sites, and for a while I did this instead of using SmallNews. However, I found I was reading a lot less of each day's newspaper, as it lacked the page-turning experience of a real newspaper, and I was constantly getting distracted by other links on the page. So I went back to using SmallNews.
iBooks is OK, but it's not a very good newspaper reader. There's just something about it which doesn't feel right for reading newspapers. So I have switched to using GoodReader (only 59p/99c), which is a great PDF reader.
None of the existing PDF sizes created by SmallNews were quite right for the iPad screen - they all worked, but none of them were perfect. So I added another option to generate an iPad landscape-optimized PDF.

So there are now 4 different PDF versions available. This is clearly getting a bit silly, so in the next version I am going to change the way the PDF formats are chosen, allowing you to specify page size, font size, number of columns, etc, with the option to choose from a list of presets.

SmallDVD screencast in German

2010-04-19T01:43:53+00:00

For the German speakers amongst you, a screencast about SmallDVD.

SmallNews and the iPad, part 2

2010-04-18T04:12:53+00:00

After discovering how to create a US iTunes account (incredibly easy when you know how), I've been able to install iBooks on my iPad, and try the ePub output from SmallNews on it.

It looks good, in both portrait and landscape modes:

The table of contents isn't quite right. The TOC created by SmallNews 2.01 has all the titles blank. I believe this is a bug in iBooks. I've been able to work around it, but only in a way that is likely to mess it up for other readers, so I will need to take a little time to work out the right format for it to work on everything. iBooks also seems to ignore the different levels of the TOC - it puts the headings and sub-headings at the same level. I think this is another bug.

So, a little bit of work to do before a proper release, but if anyone desperately wants the fix, let me know.

SmallNews and the iPad

2010-04-12T00:23:04+00:00

I'm happy to report that I've been able to get an iPad while visiting California on a business trip. So I've been trying SmallNews output on it. The best format to use ought to be epub, as this is what the new iBooks application supports. But unfortunately, I've not been able to install that as the iPad App Store currently only supports US accounts, and I only have a UK one.

So in the meantime, I've been e-mail the PDF versions to myself to see what those look like. Neither the full PDF or the eBook version looks quite right - the full version looks too small (see below), and the eBook version too big. Not surprising really, as the screen size is somewhere between a typical eBook reader and an A4 page.

So, for the moment, I've made a minor change to the eBook version, to change the page size, and use 2 columns.

This feels just the right size for the iPad screen.

What this tells me is that I ought to change SmallNews so that instead of picking which of an ever-increasing list of sizes should be created, the page size, number of columns and font size of the PDF versions should be configurable directly.

I still think epub will end up being the best approach, but PDF provides a useful alternative, so I will continue to support it.

Downloading get_iplayer

2010-03-27T22:06:09+00:00

Earlier this month, Phil Lewis announced that he was dropping his excellent get_iplayer application due to the attitude of the BBC towards open source iPlayer clients. I was desperately disappointed by this, but completely understand and respect his reasoning.
Like much of the development of the iPlayer, the logic behind the BBC's ban on open source clients is so bad it's almost funny, but the result is that we are left without what was a fantastic way of using iPlayer.

Luckily, I do have a complete copy of the get_iplayer code repository. I've put it on Google Code at get-iplayer-lives.googlecode.com. As the latest version of get_iplayer does still work, all most people are likely to want is perl script itself; you can find that here: get_iplayer.

Of course, the BBC may make changes that break get_iplayer. If that's the case, I'm not confident that I would know how to fix it. But I would be very happy to give access to the repository for anyone who does feel they would be able to - drop me a private message via the feedback tab if you want to do this.

SmallNews, the iPad and The Times paywall

2010-03-27T20:28:00+00:00

The Times announced yesterday that the long-anticipated "paywall" around it's online content will start from June. Fairly obviously, this will almost certainly stop SmallNews from getting content from The Times, so when that happens, I will drop support for this. Personally, I won't miss it; I don't believe there's anything in The Times that can't be got elsewhere. So I'm inclined to agree with Jeff Jarvis's description of this as pathetic.

More positively, I'm expecting the Apple iPad to be a great way of reading newspapers. Luckily, I will be in California a week after the launch, so hope to get one before they're available in Europe. I will then make adapting SmallNews to work well on the iPad a top priority. I'm hoping that nothing much will need to be done, as the ePub version should already work. But a little bit of tweaking may be required.

SmallShrink 0.3

2010-03-11T21:48:18+00:00

SmallShrink 0.3 is available to download. This remains a fairly technical release but it makes major improvements and flexibility to the way DVDs are processed, and adds a variety of other features:

Allows choice of tools to use for DVD extracting, demuxing and remuxing.
Allows greater control over whether the DVD will be requantized (shrunk).
Allows DVD titles to be extracted to individual files instead of a DVD image
Separation of the basic and advanced controls in the user interface
Allows temporary files to be kept or discarded
Writes output to a log file in the specified output directory

This release has only been tested on Mac OS X 10.6.

Many of these features need a little explaining, which I will aim to document in the near future. What does need explaining now though is the extraction/demuxing/remuxing options.

The default method of extracting, demuxing and remuxing the DVD is to use mencoder. In my own tests, I've found that this works on almost all of my DVD collection. Although I've not timed it, I think that using tccat for extraction, ffmpeg for demux and mplex for remux is a little faster, but less reliable for heavily copy-protected DVDs.

If this release proves to be fairly stable, the next one will aim to hide some of the technical detail to make it more accessible for "normal" people.

Finally, the source code is now available at smallshrink.googlecode.com.