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Urssus: July 29th - Moo till it's done

I may have got­ten a bit car­ried away with mootool­s: Com­bined view now has an ac­cor­dion-­like thing google-read­er style.

urssus13

Not too pret­ty, but pret­ty's not my thing.

Urssus: July 29th - An original feature, at last (with screenshot)

Tired of chas­ing af­ter oth­er pro­gram's fea­tures, I took a de­tour on the orig­i­nal fea­ture road: the com­bined view is now much nicer than Akre­ga­tor's.

Why? Be­cause you can use it and still flag in­di­vid­u­al ar­ti­cles as read­/un­read­/im­por­tan­t.

Us­ing a tiny bit of mootools and some rudi­men­ta­ry javascrip­t, plus a wee Ten­jin tem­plate ef­fort...

urssus12

And yes, the "but­ton­s" ap­pear and dis­ap­pear as need­ed, and up­date the GUI just like they should.

Urssus: July 28th late at night - Released 0.2.0 and it's outdated already (with screenshots)

Yes, I re­leased 0.2.0, and an­nounced it on PyP­I, Fresh­meat and kde-app­s.org, we'll see what hap­pen­s.

But why is it out­dat­ed? Be­cause I am do­ing nicer UI work, al­ready.

  • The search wid­get is now a bot­­tom-locked tool­bar, which is much clean­er.

  • There are now 3 win­­dow lay­outs (nor­­mal, widescreen and com­bined) and each has a "long feed list" and a "short feed list" var­i­an­t.

Here is widescreen-­long:

urssus10

And here are widescreen-short, widescreen-­long, nor­mal-short, and com­bined-short, all scrunched in a sin­gle screen (yes, you can run mul­ti­ple urssus (urssus­es? urssi?):

urssus11

Urssus: July 28th - Cleanup

I did a fair amount of work in urssus to­day. The high­light? data­base schema mi­gra­tion.

Here is the (not re­al­ly) full list:

  • Fix­es on the in­­stal­l­er

  • Fix in im­­por­­tOPML

  • Raise the win­­dow when you click on the systray pop­up

  • Fixed sev­er­al is­­sues af­ter feed dele­­tion

  • Fixed sev­er­al is­­sues with feeds not up­­­dat­ing the UI's un­read count

  • Fixed the look of but­­tons on search­Wid­get and fil­ter­Wid­get

  • And sev­er­al more...

And the big one:

  • Im­­ple­­men­t­ed data­base schema ver­­sion­ing us­ing sqlalche­my-mi­­grate.

What does that mean? That I can change the data­base and the us­er will not no­tice any­thing.

On star­tup, uRSSus checks if you are us­ing the cor­rect schema, and up­dates your data­base ac­cord­ing­ly.

For ex­am­ple, I can now im­ple­ment man­u­al feed sort­ing just adding a "po­si­tion" col­umn to the Feed class. If I had not im­ple­ment­ed this, that would re­quire a much greater hack.

Now? I just do it, write an up­grade/­down­grade scrip­t, and that's al­l. Mi­grate is re­al­ly a very cool tool, and shows the strength of us­ing SQLAlche­my (not so much that of us­ing Elixir, be­cause they get along grudg­ing­ly ;-)

Cur­rent LOC coun­t: 1491

Cur­rent sta­tus: still fun! (and ed­u­ca­tion­al!)

Cuil, you fail!

Sure, new search en­gine Cuil serch­es "121,617,892,992 web pages". I be­lieve it... maybe.

How­ev­er, I tried a sim­ple test. My name. I know more or less where it ap­pears:

  • My blog

  • My linkedin pages

  • Sev­er­al FLOSS host­ing sites

  • A bazil­lion mail­ing list ar­chives

On google this search gives the ex­pect­ed re­sult­s:

search2

On Cuil? Not so much:

search1

In oth­er word­s, I man­aged to be skipped by Cuil com­plete­ly. All traces of my last 12 years on the In­ter­net? Not seen. That kin­da makes me not too con­fi­dent ;-)


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