SmallNews 

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Whoops. I found a bug in the wait for publication feature that was added to SmallNews 2.0 at the last minute. It didn't work for the 1st-9th of the month. Fixed now in SmallNews 2.01.

SmallNews 

Friday, February 26, 2010

SmallNews 2.0 can now create the newspaper as an ePub format eBook. ePub has been in the news a lot recently because it was mentioned as the format that the Apple iPad will support. In fact, most recent eBook readers (with the notable except of the Amazon Kindle) will read it. The best known desktop client is Adobe Digital Editions.

So which is better, PDF or ePub? That depends on what you want to do with it. If you format a PDF with the page size of the device you're going to read it on, then it looks great. But if you read an PDF formatted for A4 pages on an 6" eBook reader screen, it looks a mess. Yes, some readers do enable the PDF to be reflowed, but this is never entirely successful. Also, on my Sony Reader, if I increase the font size, the page flow gets messed up.

ePub, on the other hand, is designed to be reflowed. I find that at the default font size, there is not much difference between ePub and PDF on my Sony Reader. But if you increase the font size, the ePub version handles it much, much better. So I've switched to using ePub as the main version I read.

Where ePub really comes into it's own is on even smaller devices, such as iPhone/iPod Touch. I previously used GoodReader to read the iPod version of the PDF. This worked quite well. I tried Stanza, but never really liked it for reading PDFs. But it's a much better ePub reader, so I've switched to using Stanza/ePub on my iPod.

I said in the release notes that support for ePub in SmallNews is experimental. I have found that articles from The Guardian work very well in this format. But some other feeds are a little more unpredictable. ePub is an XHTML-based format, so the HTML from the newspaper site has to be converted to XHTML. If the source material is not well-constructed, this can cause problems. Most feeds I have tried do work, but my Sony Reader has crashed on 2 or 3 occasions. Whether this is the fault of the Sony software or the ePub created by SmallNews, I don't know. Anyway, I would argue that even if the ePub is not quite perfect, the Sony Reader still shouldn't crash. I will watch this over the next few weeks and see if I can establish any pattern.

If you're interested in the technical detail of creating ePub files, they are basically a zip file of XHTML content, XML metadata and images. I found three tutorials about very useful:

• http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/epub-guide_hxa7241_2007.html
• http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp
• http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/2008/12/13/creating-ebooks-an-epub-tutorial/

SmallNews 

Thursday, February 25, 2010

SmallNews 2.0 is (finally) available for download. It's taken a long time because I kept adding features I want to put in, rather than finishing the others ones I'd already started.

This version adds three new features:

• Purging of the database. This can be performed manually from the Settings tab, and you can specify how many days of articles you want to keep.
  
• Experimental ePub support. You can now specify that an ePub version of the newspaper is created either as well or instead of the PDF version. It works very well for The Guardian, but can be a little more unpredictable for other feeds. More information about that to follow.
  
• Wait for publication. The handler for the The Guardian has the (as yet, undocumented) ability to generate the newspaper in the same order as the printed version. This makes it a great deal more coherent, but The Guardian don't always get around to publishing this until mid-morning. This option can instruct SmallNews to wait until today's edition has been published before starting a scheduled run. More info to follow on that too.
  

All of these need a bit more documentation, which I will aim to do shortly. I have added quite a bit of extra documentation since 2.0b3; you can find it on the SmallNews page.

Also, the source code for SmallNews is now available. It has always been an open source application in principle, I just never got round to publishing the source.

SmallNews 

Friday, February 12, 2010

A third beta release of SmallNews 2.0 is now available. This adds most of the features that had been marked as "not yet implemented" in the previous release, and a couple of other minor changes.

• Scheduled daily creation of the newspaper
  
• Create PDFs of articles from the database
  
• Send PDFs of articles from the database by e-mail
  
• A feed tester, to allow individual feeds to be tried (useful if they are not behaving the way you expect)
  
• A fix to one of The Guardian handlers which was not writing articles to the database correctly

I've also written some more documentation, and will continue to add to this over the next week.

The one outstanding feature that needs to be added before I call this version 2.0 is the ability to purge the database of old articles.

After this, I am planning to add two new significant features:

• Ability to search the database by keyword, author, date, etc, instead of just the article id.
  
• Support for the Apple iPad. This looks to me like it's going to be a great device to use SmallNews on, but I'll have to wait and see what the best format will be. I understand that it will support the ePub format, so I may look again at that. I originally consider ePub when adding support for the Sony Reader, but decided that a small-page PDF worked very well, so it wasn't really necessary.

SmallNews 

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

SmallNews 2.0b2 is available to download. This has three changes since 2.0b1:

• Option to create an iPhone/iPod specific version. I use GoodReader on my iPod Touch to read this, although I am sure other PDF viewers will work as well.
• Fixed the formatting of certain feeds which use h4, h5 and h6 tags, such as Engadget
• Fixed an occasional problem with the BBC feeds

I’ve had a few reports of problems with certain feeds when using SmallNews 1.0. I strongly recommend upgrading to 2.0b2 instead of using 1.0. Although it’s marked as beta version, that’s really because it has some unfinished features. It is no less stable than 1.0.

iPod/iPhone  SmallNews 

Friday, November 06, 2009

Two things have happened in the last week that have forced me to finally get round to making SmallNews iPod/iPhone-friendly.

Firstly, I gave in and bought an iPod Touch. I’ve wanted one for a while, to understand the whole App Store thing a bit better, but have struggled to justify buying yet another mobile gadget.

Secondly, I came incredibly close to leaving my Sony eBook reader on a plane last night. It wouldn’t have been the first time – I left a minidisc player on a flight to Stockholm (minidisc… it was a while ago), and I left my first Archos AV420 on a plane to Dublin. I turn them off for landing put them in the seat pocket, then never see them again.

So, new rule, no gadgets on planes that don’t fit in my shirt pocket. And the iPod Touch passes that requirement very nicely.

It turns out that the eBook version that SmallNews works very nicely on an iPod/iPhone using GoodReader. OK, it’s not free, but at $0.99 at the moment, it’s a bargain. Other readers such as Stanza can read the files, but the layout is horrible. So I’m using GoodReader, which also provides a very easy way of uploading the PDF to the iPod/iPhone over wifi.

This is what it looks like with all the menus on:

and this is what it looks like with the menus hidden.

The text would perhaps benefit from being a little bigger, so I might look at an option to create an iPhone/iPod-specific edition in the next release. But it’s quite readable as it is, and of course you can do all that multi-touch stuff to make it bigger.

On a related note, I also got SmallNews running on my Linux-based EeePC. More on that another time though.

SmallNews 

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Two new versions of SmallNews available today.

v1.0 is actually just the same as v0.4, but is renamed to reflect the fact it’s the last release of this branch of the application.

v2.0b1 represents includes several major enhancements:

• Articles can be saved in a database (either built-in SQLite, or external MySQL)
• Articles can then be retrieved by their id, and posted to Twitter or Facebook
• New handler for The Independent
• Reorganisation of the user interface (see here for screenshot)

The database feature requires a bit of explaining – look out for a post on that soon.

However, there are some features not yet finished. Hopefully they are clearly marked in the application, but they are:

• Creating a PDF or sending an e-mail of an article retrieved from the database
• Purging old articles from the database
• Scheduled creation of the newspaper
• Handler for The Telegraph
• Fix to the handler for The Independent, as the images do not layout correctly in the PDF version.

I hope to add/fix all of these shortly and release another beta version.

SmallNews 

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A quick bit of information about the forthcoming SmallNews 2.0.

I am going to rename the current release of SmallNews (0.4) as 1.0, because it will be the last release of that branch of the code, and I haven't touched it for quite a while.

Instead, I’ve been spending time on 2.0 which contains some major new features.

• every article can be saved in a database for later retrieval


• these articles can then be sent by Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or exported as a PDF


• new handlers for full text articles from The Telegraph and The Independent


• scheduled creation of the newspaper each day


• reorganization of the user interface

It’s taken a little longer than I intended to get a beta version of this released, because I keep adding new things to it rather than finishing the ones that are already there. But I’m going to try especially hard to stop doing that and get it released.

In the meantime, here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

.

SmallNews 

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

SmallNews 0.4 is now available for download. This fixes the date problem when running on Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, and contains one or two other minor layout fixes.

If this version proves to be stable, I will probably rename it “1.0” soon. Work is already underway on 2.0… more on that later.

SmallDVD  SmallNews 

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

I upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) yesterday, and found mixed results for compatibility with my applications.

• SmallDVD appears to work without any problems
• SmallNews works, but it does generate a lot of warnings about dates which rather ruins the layout of the newspaper. I will release a fix shortly.
• SmallMP3 has a more serious problem in that it doesn’t work with the new version of Quicktime. And it seems that the new Quicktime can’t play MP2 audio files any more, which was one of the main things I used it for.