RSS / Feedly-like extension?

[HenriHudson]

There is one reason that makes me go back from Camino to Firefox sometimes: being able to read my (numerous, Google reader) rss feeds with the very nice layout of the Feedly extension (rated ***** by addons.mozilla.org users).

I also use a standalone rss reader/application (Gruml) but the layout is so poor compared to Feedly…

Anyway, I can't help but wonder why no developer (to my knowledge) ever created a Camino extension or script similar to Feedly, or based on the Feedly extension's code. Is it just that developers don't read rss feeds?

Cheers and happy new year to you all,

HH

[cflawson]

I suspect most of us are much happier with something like NetNewsWire than Google Reader, but if all Feedly is doing is changing the layout of Google Reader, it's probably something that could be implemented fairly easily via Camino's userContent.css file.

cl

[HenriHudson]

Isn't Netnewswire's interface / layout about as ugly as Gruml's or Google Reader's?

[NB I guess my explanation wasn't clear enough, my bad: As far as Google Reader is concerned, there might be a Google app to access it, but i only use it under Camino, via its web interface, subscribing to each new feed thanks to a "subscribe" bookmarklet... Which takes you to the GR page and allows you to immediately put the new rss feed in the right folder without having to open yet another app.]

if all Feedly is doing is changing the layout of Google Reader, it's probably something that could be implemented fairly easily via Camino's userContent.css file.

Well, if someone (i am no developer at all) could do that, it would certainly make my day As far as i know, Feedly imports any opml file of your choice, which you then have to manually update. It doesn't have to be a "Google Reader file", which makes its interest much wider and probably explains why so many people rated it ***** on the Mozilla add-ons page)

HH

[cflawson]

Frankly, I find feed management in Google Reader vastly inferior to NNW's. (Vienna has also been highly recommended, but I've never tried it myself.)

About the only compelling reason I can see to use GR over any third-party RSS application is that its feeds are in "the cloud" and thus the same no matter where you are, whereas third-party applications require local storage and don't (generally) sync. (NNW used to but I found it horribly unreliable and I believe that feature has since been removed.) Conversely, you can't browse feeds in GR while offline, which you can do just fine in NNW.

cl

[thom-22]

Frankly, I find feed management in Google Reader vastly inferior to NNW's. (Vienna has also been highly recommended, but I've never tried it myself.)

About the only compelling reason I can see to use GR over any third-party RSS application is that its feeds are in "the cloud" and thus the same no matter where you are, whereas third-party applications require local storage and don't (generally) sync. (NNW used to but I found it horribly unreliable and I believe that feature has since been removed.) Conversely, you can't browse feeds in GR while offline, which you can do just fine in NNW.

I think you're missing that the compelling reason for GR -- to the OP I guess? and me as well -- is to not have to use a separate application at all. No two people use feeds in exactly the same way and for me at least, looking at my feeds in anything outside of my browser would be a "vastly inferior" UE no matter how good its layout might be. GR's layout could certainly be improved; if there were add-ons that made that easy to do in Camino I would probably avail myself of them, but like the OP, I don't have the knowledge to make one myself. But even as it is GR is better than having to switch to a different application to see my feeds.

[Uncle Asad]

I actually had a look at Feedly last night. It's…weird.

Feedly is essentially a web application (e.g., like Gmail or Google Reader) packaged as an extension for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome There's absolutely no reason it couldn't have been implemented at feedly.com for everyone, regardless of browser. (At least as far as I can tell from getting the Firefox extension to work in Firefox, and examining its internals and the internals of the Safari extension, which didn't actually work when I tried it The feedly.com website is big on hype and videos and light on information telling you how it works or how to configure it, or how to troubleshoot when the behavior doesn't change after you've installed the extension )

Given that it's cross-browser, there's no reason why it couldn't be made to work in Camino. I installed the parts of the Firefox extension in the appropriate places in my Camino profile, verified the XPCOM component loaded and the chrome was registered, and then couldn't figure out what wasn't working, except perhaps that the Firefox extension has a tiny dependency on overlaying browser.xul to load one script. In theory that script could be loaded by the XPCOM component, although that also didn't seem to work for me when I tried it. So it's unclear what's not working, but given there's no other dependency on XUL, someone who understands the code (or who understands JS in general) should probably be able to make it work properly in Camino with a few tweaks. (It's also possible there are a few other places where they are relying on some functions that are only defined in Firefox; I didn't look through all 50 .js files )

I would suggest that people interested in this ask the Feedly people politely about investigating Camino compatibility, since they obviously know their code far better than I do

[HenriHudson]

Given that it's cross-browser, there's no reason why it couldn't be made to work in Camino. I installed the parts of the Firefox extension in the appropriate places in my Camino profile, verified the XPCOM component loaded and the chrome was registered, and then couldn't figure out what wasn't working, except perhaps that the Firefox extension has a tiny dependency on overlaying browser.xul to load one script. In theory that script could be loaded by the XPCOM component, although that also didn't seem to work for me when I tried it. So it's unclear what's not working, but given there's no other dependency on XUL, someone who understands the code (or who understands JS in general) should probably be able to make it work properly in Camino with a few tweaks. (It's also possible there are a few other places where they are relying on some functions that are only defined in Firefox; I didn't look through all 50 .js files )

I would suggest that people interested in this ask the Feedly people politely about investigating Camino compatibility, since they obviously know their code far better than I do

Thanks so much for looking into this! Can i quote the above part of your message when writing to the Feedly people?

HH

[HenriHudson]

Frankly, I find feed management in Google Reader vastly inferior to NNW's. (Vienna has also been highly recommended, but I've never tried it myself.)

About the only compelling reason I can see to use GR over any third-party RSS application is that its feeds are in "the cloud" and thus the same no matter where you are, whereas third-party applications require local storage and don't (generally) sync. (NNW used to but I found it horribly unreliable and I believe that feature has since been removed.) Conversely, you can't browse feeds in GR while offline, which you can do just fine in NNW.

I think you're missing that the compelling reason for GR -- to the OP I guess? and me as well -- is to not have to use a separate application at all.

Exactly. If a feed provides lasting, not "throwable" information, i save it on my hard disk, but most of the time, i use feeds as a newspaper i do not even have to discard after reading it. Feedly is "just" a nice newspaper-like layout for your feeds (with additional social network sharing capabilities i don't use but might be interesting to some).

GR's layout could certainly be improved; if there were add-ons that made that easy to do in Camino I would probably avail myself of them, but like the OP, I don't have the knowledge to make one myself.

Yep. And that is probably why Feedly for Iphone/Android was rated the 2nd best application of the year in that category by Time Magazine.

HH

[Uncle Asad]

Given that it's cross-browser, there's no reason why it couldn't be made to work in Camino. I installed the parts of the Firefox extension in the appropriate places in my Camino profile, verified the XPCOM component loaded and the chrome was registered, and then couldn't figure out what wasn't working, except perhaps that the Firefox extension has a tiny dependency on overlaying browser.xul to load one script. In theory that script could be loaded by the XPCOM component, although that also didn't seem to work for me when I tried it. So it's unclear what's not working, but given there's no other dependency on XUL, someone who understands the code (or who understands JS in general) should probably be able to make it work properly in Camino with a few tweaks. (It's also possible there are a few other places where they are relying on some functions that are only defined in Firefox; I didn't look through all 50 .js files )

I would suggest that people interested in this ask the Feedly people politely about investigating Camino compatibility, since they obviously know their code far better than I do

Thanks so much for looking into this! Can i quote the above part of your message when writing to the Feedly people?

I guess I'd prefer you not directly quote it, although I suppose that second quoted paragraph puts things back in the proper perspective.

[HenriHudson]

I guess I'd prefer you not directly quote it, although I suppose that second quoted paragraph puts things back in the proper perspective.

OK, noted. Where shall i refer them to if they want to find out more about programming add-ons to Camino?

HH

[Uncle Asad]

We don't really have any documentation on the new features added in 2.1 (which is what gives us extension-like compatibility), although that's something we've been meaning to do The documentation would show up under http://wiki.caminobrowser.org/Developme ... Developers on the wiki; I'll see if I can't get a "stub" page with the basics up shortly, though.

[Uncle Asad]

I'll see if I can't get a "stub" page with the basics up shortly, though.

http://wiki.caminobrowser.org/Developme ... ith_Camino

[HenriHudson]

I'll see if I can't get a "stub" page with the basics up shortly, though.

http://wiki.caminobrowser.org/Developme ... ith_Camino

Great! Thanks for being so reactive.

HH