I recently work on BookmarkKit a lot to be used in Mantella later. An idea occurs to me that if Grr can also use BookmarkKit to store RSS subscription, then the web browser and RSS reader can work together better.
Now, BookmarkKit provide a shared storage system, just like Addresses, and any application can access them. So if Mantella and Grr both use the same bookmark storage for RSS subscription (I define a BKRSSBookmarkStore for that), users can add a RSS subscription in Mantalla (drag-and-drop into BKRSSBookmarkStore) and that subscription will show up in Grr. The same idea is that if a user add an instant messenger ID in AddressManager, it will also shows up in the instant messenger if they share the same data. I haven't look at the internal of Grr for feeds. Using BookmarkKit for that also ease the trouble for Grr to store and display subscriptions. There is a BKBookmarkView in /Etoile/Developer/Examples/BookmarkKitExample to display a given bookmark store in outline view. I plan to move it into BookmarkKit later. A second thing is the user interface of Grr. Most RSS readers on surface are 3-pane style, where subscriptions on the left in a outline view and article on the right. The other possibility is like GNUMail with subscriptons in a separated window. And it is what Grr has now. People will expect to open multiple article windows in GNUMail-like design. Otherwise, why put the subscription window separately. Then Grr has to manage multiple article windows, which I think is too much trouble. Therefore, the 3-pane style would be easier from this point of view. In any case, I suggest to make the subscription window a outline view and move all buttons into toolbar as GNUMail: http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail.data/screenshots/v1.2.0pre2/gnumail-gs.png If Grr adapt BookmarkKit, it will be easy to do that. Finally, Grr use thread to get articles asynchronously. I personally prefer not to use thread if there is another way around. NSFileHandle provide a way to get data through network asynchronously without thread. Netclasses (http://netclasses.aeruder.net/) provides similar function. The drawback is that you need to do the hand-shaking manually since NSFileHandele or netclasses does not know http protocol. But I assume it won't be too complicated. Have fun ! Yen-Ju _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
