[Ext] Brief 1.1 - feed reading extension

John Liebson · Post by **John Liebson** » April 2nd, 2007, 7:39 pm

Ancestor wrote:That's true. Brief 0.6 hasn't been released yet, mind you, for precisely this reason - it's still incomplete and has some bugs. :P

Kindly remove all bugs instantly and release the 0.6 version immediately.

Be certain that you do the removal kindly; we don't want you upsetting the bugs.

Thank you....

Ancestor · Post by **Ancestor** » April 4th, 2007, 4:28 am

Brief 0.6 is out! Available from addons.mozilla.org or from my homepage.

See the changelog for details. I incorporated many of the ideas which I got from people in this topic and I squashed quite a few bugs. Thank you all for your feedback!

John Liebson · Post by **John Liebson** » April 4th, 2007, 5:37 am

Problem with 0.6: I cannot empty the trash.

There are now 861 items in the trash, thanks to the nifty new ability to empty feeds. However, if I right-click on "Trash" and then on "Empty Trash," or if I click on Trash so that it loads and then try to empty it, in either case, Firefox stops responding. I've tried this several times now, and each time I have to restart Firefox; when I do, I find the same 861 entries are still in the trash.

[EDIT]

Out of curiosity, I tried moving everything out of trash back into their respective feeds. That worked, and rather quickly at that. I then started moving feeds back into the trash and emptying the trash; that process even worked when I had 196 items in the trash.

My guess, and it is nothing but a guess, is that there is some limitation in Brief and/or Firefox that limits how large the trash can be before emptying it fails.

On a different note, my thanks for the great improvement in how Brief treats feeds when one reads specific items, namely that Brief now does not return the feed to the top; instead, it marks the selected item as having been read and leaves the feed right where it was.

alta88 · Post by **alta88** » April 4th, 2007, 9:09 am

Adam, very nice! like the fade effect upon delete and many others..

if i may make a few comments:

- i've turned off autoupdate and just do it manually; when updating Newest Mozilla Addons feed eg. the throbber runs forever without updating. there should be a timeout interrupt for non responding or invalid feeds (with some error msg/notifier probably)..

- context menu is not the same for links within the feed items' content as it is on web pages, nor even the same as context menu for the feed content header. so one cannot use Open Link in New Tab on the title, or Save Image As.. on an image (this may be why Image Zoom doesn't work). something to do with html:div tags construct?

- can you make the title drag n droppable? this way, using Split Browser, one can open a new pane simply by dragging the title onto SB's dropmarker indicator. then both 3paners and 2paners can be happy ; )

- is there any way you can make the sidebar configurable to actually open in the Fx sidebar?

thanks.

oh, do you have an example 2 column stylesheet, i uninstalled Sage a while ago otherwise i'd try to clone one..

smacd75 · Post by **smacd75** » April 4th, 2007, 2:05 pm

Being a long time Sage user I'm almost (I said ALMOST!) sad to say that there is no comparison. The look and feel of Brief, along with it's terrific feature set, make it the clear choice when it comes to an integrated RSS reader for Firefox.

Great work Ancestor!

Ancestor · Post by **Ancestor** » April 5th, 2007, 5:34 am

John Liebson wrote:Problem with 0.6: I cannot empty the trash.

<snip>

Out of curiosity, I tried moving everything out of trash back into their respective feeds. That worked, and rather quickly at that. I then started moving feeds back into the trash and emptying the trash; that process even worked when I had 196 items in the trash.

I haven't seen it. If you ever come across reliable steps to reproduce it, please let me know.

alta88 wrote:- i've turned off autoupdate and just do it manually; when updating Newest Mozilla Addons feed eg. the throbber runs forever without updating. there should be a timeout interrupt for non responding or invalid feeds (with some error msg/notifier probably)..

The case of invalid (badly formatted, empty) feeds is actually handled - an error icon is shown as the favicon. It's when the server isn't responding that you see the throbber spin indefinitely. I know I have to deal with it, it's on my TODO list.

- context menu is not the same for links within the feed items' content as it is on web pages, nor even the same as context menu for the feed content header. so one cannot use Open Link in New Tab on the title, or Save Image As.. on an image (this may be why Image Zoom doesn't work). something to do with html:div tags construct?

- can you make the title drag n droppable? this way, using Split Browser, one can open a new pane simply by dragging the title onto SB's dropmarker indicator. then both 3paners and 2paners can be happy ; )

Both of these are side effects of using XBL widgets to display the entries. I don't think it's going to change, it's just how it works.

- is there any way you can make the sidebar configurable to actually open in the Fx sidebar?

Sorry to keep shooting you down like this but again it's impossible. It has to be one way or another, it would be far too much hassle to make it configurable.

oh, do you have an example 2 column stylesheet, i uninstalled Sage a while ago otherwise i'd try to clone one..

Yeah, that should be pretty easy. Perhaps I'll try to put it together and post it here sometime.

smacd75 wrote:Being a long time Sage user I'm almost (I said ALMOST!) sad to say that there is no comparison. The look and feel of Brief, along with it's terrific feature set, make it the clear choice when it comes to an integrated RSS reader for Firefox.

Great work Ancestor!

My pleasure!

alta88 · Post by **alta88** » April 5th, 2007, 9:37 am

Ancestor wrote:
- context menu is not the same for links within the feed items' content as it is on web pages, nor even the same as context menu for the feed content header. so one cannot use Open Link in New Tab on the title, or Save Image As.. on an image (this may be why Image Zoom doesn't work). something to do with html:div tags construct?

- can you make the title drag n droppable? this way, using Split Browser, one can open a new pane simply by dragging the title onto SB's dropmarker indicator. then both 3paners and 2paners can be happy ; )

Both of these are side effects of using XBL widgets to display the entries. I don't think it's going to change, it's just how it works.

hmm, i thinks that's perhaps too high a price to pay - people are going to see a page, and expect rt click and link dnd (ie drop link onto tab) to work like it does on any other page.

- is there any way you can make the sidebar configurable to actually open in the Fx sidebar?

Sorry to keep shooting you down like this but again it's impossible. It has to be one way or another, it would be far too much hassle to make it configurable.

so i guess 'the other' is out.. ; D the reason this would be useful is that with things like MultiSidebar, a user could configure the sidebar to be in any of 4 positions, and you'd have big configuration flexibility without doing anything extra.

thanks for the reply.

Ancestor · Post by **Ancestor** » April 5th, 2007, 10:03 am

alta88 wrote:
Both of these are side effects of using XBL widgets to display the entries. I don't think it's going to change, it's just how it works.

hmm, i thinks that's perhaps too high a price to pay - people are going to see a page, and expect rt click and link dnd (ie drop link onto tab) to work like it does on any other page.

It's the price you have to pay, so it can actually *work* reasonably fast. If I wasn't using XBL and instead built the view by hand with DOM methods, the performance would probably be horrendous.

Merlyel · Post by **Merlyel** » April 6th, 2007, 7:08 am

Ancestor
So what about making progress bar always visible? I don't like feeds moving upon clicking "Check all feeds for update"

Merlyel · Post by **Merlyel** » April 6th, 2007, 7:15 am

BTW, one trouble (though this can be not brief's but fx's problem): I've got gmail account. There's rss-feed for mail checking. First time brief checked feed it showed pass request. And it does not request it until reboot of fx. But after reboot - request again

Does anybody has yhe same problem?

ethsen · Post by **ethsen** » April 6th, 2007, 7:38 am

Great extension. Is there anyway to change the size of the fonts including left pane browser tree? In Firefox I have my font size set to 14 and minimum size to 14 as well and it seems to take these settings. This size looks fine in a web page but for some reason it's jumbo sized in an extension application. Is there anything I can put in my userChrome.css to change the sizes?

Merlyel · Post by **Merlyel** » April 6th, 2007, 7:57 am

Maybe

Code: Select all

#brief-window {
font-size: 11pt
}

Or try finding another IDs of brief components.

Ancestor · Post by **Ancestor** » April 6th, 2007, 3:03 pm

Merlyel wrote:Ancestor
So what about making progress bar always visible? I don't like feeds moving upon clicking "Check all feeds for update"

So far I haven't had any complaints about it, apart from yours, so for now things are going to stay as they are.

Ancestor · Post by **Ancestor** » April 7th, 2007, 9:31 am

Merlyel wrote:BTW, one trouble (though this can be not brief's but fx's problem): I've got gmail account. There's rss-feed for mail checking. First time brief checked feed it showed pass request. And it does not request it until reboot of fx. But after reboot - request again Does anybody has yhe same problem?

I just tried it and it never asks me for the authorization; probably the cookies do their job. I'd check my cookies settings if I were you.

Merlyel · Post by **Merlyel** » April 7th, 2007, 9:51 am

Ancestor
The problem is fx enters gmail normally (not through brief). But brief requests pass every time fx is restarted.
But as you said it workef for you, I'll check new profile and see if it is the same there.