Af­ter 27 days of de­vel­op­men­t, uRSSus is fi­nal­ly a re­al­ly us­able ap­p. I miss noth­ing from Akre­ga­tor, al­though there are a few unim­ple­ment­ed things. It was bro­ken the alst cou­ple of days, be­cause I was rewrit­ing large chunks of its gut­s, but the new guts work much bet­ter ;-)

The miss­ing pieces (I know about):

• Fav­i­­cons

• Save col­umn width in post list

• Show to­­tal posts in feed list

• Drag&­­Drop is not re­li­able (weird things hap­pen ev­ery few tries)

• Metafeeds (ex. your un­read post­s/ your starred post­s) are not up­­­dat­ed au­­to­­mat­i­­cal­­ly

• Del.i­­cio.us sync is not work­ing at all

• No help

• No de­­cent con­­fig di­a­log (but a func­­tion­al re­­place­­men­t!)

• Very oc­­ca­­sion­al DB lock­­ing.

• Log­ging is bro­ken

• Need to im­­ple­­ment back­­up of the DB

That's not re­al­ly more than a day or two of work.

Right now (re­vi­sion 570) it's work­ing pret­ty good, so it's a good re­vi­sion to try, if you feel up to it.

I have been de­lay­ing this func­tion­al­i­ty be­cause I ex­pect­ed it to be hard to do, then... it was very easy! Now you can cre­ate "metafeed­s" based on queries. Here's the first ex­am­ple: "Post.im­por­tan­t==True".

Of course, be­yond a set of stan­dard metafeed­s, a UI to al­low the us­er to cre­ate them will be hard but at least the ba­sic func­tion­al­i­ty is there (BTW, it's 15 (fif­teen!) lines of code)

When try­ing to se­ri­al­ize python data, of­ten the first thing we look at is pick­le. Well, some­times pick­le can be very ex­pen­sive!

Here Post is an elixir class, which means it's an ob­ject mapped to a re­la­tion­al database, and com­par­ing its prop­er­ties to some­thing is pret­ty much a piece of a SQL WHERE state­men­t.

>>> print Post.important==True
posts.important = ?

What hap­pens when we pick­le it?

>>> print len(pickle.dumps(Post.important==True))
27287
>>> print pickle.loads(s)
posts.important = :important_1

Yikes. What's a bet­ter so­lu­tion?

>>> print eval('Post.important==True')
posts.important = ?

As long as we are sure no weird da­ta will get in­to the eval...

It's run­ning pre­ty sta­ble (at least for me) so I de­cid­ed to fix some is­sues and add some fea­tures. First a screen­shot:

And now tex­t:

• A new fea­­ture that al­­so fix­es an is­­sue:

  vgar­­vardt asked about sort­ing by feed,­­for ex­am­­ple when read­­ing a fold­er. Im­­ple­­men­t­ed it us­ing a "feed" col­umn that you can en­able/dis­­able. Since your choice is per­­sis­ten­t, there's no need to add a con­­fig­u­ra­­tion op­­tion to the di­a­log.

• Im­­por­­tant is now Starred. I rel­­ly like google's idea of us­ing stars at hand to mark things im­­por­­tan­t. So, there they are. The star icon I did my­­self, in Inkscape, try­ing to re­spect the Rein­hardt style. I think it looks nice.

• Google News feed­s! Yes, I know I could just go to http://news.­­google.­­com, make a search and sub­­scribe to the re­­sults page. Can my mom? Nope. So, when adding new feed, just choose "Cre­ate google news feed" en­ter some key­­word­s, and it's ready.

  I need to add "cus­­tom field­­s" to the feed con­­fig di­alog, though, since once it's cret­ed it's just a reg­u­lar feed with a long URL.

• Al­­so did some per­­for­­mance and re­li­a­­bil­i­­ty work, and cur­rent SVN (r476) is ac­­tu­al­­ly quite a bit nicer than 0.2.10 al­ready. So there may be an­oth­er re­lease soon­ish.

Yes friend­s, my desk­top feed agre­ga­tor uRSSus has a brand new re­lease.

You can get it at http://urssus.­google­code.­com or http://pyp­i.python.org or via easy_in­stal­l.

There is a rather large bug in that the con­fig­u­ra­tion di­a­log may or may not work for you. Don't wor­ry, there is no life-or-death op­tion there, just ig­nore it.

As al­ways, I am look­ing for a hand mak­ing it work well on Win­dows and Mac.

Let me know if you like it (or if you don't).