SmallNews 2.2

SmallNews 

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

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

SmallNews 

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

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?

SmallNews 2.1

SmallNews 

Friday, June 04, 2010

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.

SmallNews, the iPad and The Times paywall

SmallNews 

Saturday, March 27, 2010

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.

SmallNews 2.01

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.

ePub support in SmallNews 2.0

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/

Also, this ePub validator.

SmallNews 2.0 released

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 2.0b3

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 2.0b2

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.

SmallNews on iPod/iPhone

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.