SmallNews 2.0b3
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.
