Bug fixes and new features are here in Feed Notifier 2.5! Configurable colors!
New Pop-up Options
- Wait if hovering: Don’t advance to the next pop-up if you’re hovering over it with your mouse.
- Stay on top: Now you can choose to not have pop-ups stay on top, if you wish.
- Border size: You can configure the size of the pop-up border.
- Border color: You can configure the color of the pop-up border – and this can be done on a per-feed basis to help distinguish between items from different feeds!
- Right-click links to copy the link URL.
Other Features
- Allow fallback on Windows-configured proxy.
- Improved cache mechanism.
- Proxy info is encoded on disk and displayed like a password in the user interface.
- Checks for software updates every 24 hours, not just on app startup.
Bug Fixes
- 15 second socket timeout (was infinite, which caused problems with bad feeds).
- Use black text color in pop-ups, regardless of system theme.
- Use proxy when downloading feed favicons.
- Removed webkit and html theme code remnants that weren’t being used.
Feed Notifier 2.4 is a small but important update that fixes a bug that caused many users to frequently lose their configuration settings. The file loading and saving routines have been improved to be much more robust, and the app no longer tries to save the configuration on exit – as that wasn’t necessary. Let me know if you still have issues after updating!
Update: I snuck in another bug fix into the 2.4 release. The Windows 7 32-bit shutdown crash should now be fixed. If you updated Feed Notifier in the past day – you’ll need to update again. I’m not incrementing the version number.
I have released Feed Notifier’s source code under a BSD license. I have no reason to keep the source code to myself and I can’t keep up with the feature requests and bug fixes as quickly as I would like. If anyone wants to contribute software patches, I will be happy to review them and possibly include them in future versions of the software. Check out the Download page and enjoy!
Feed Notifier 2.3 is a culmination of features and bug-fixes based on user feedback. Some larger features have been left out but will be included in later versions.
New Features
Three new features have been added. They aren’t huge improvements, but are all nice to have.
Sound Notifications
Some users prefer to have the pop-up notifications accompanied by a sound in case they aren’t looking at the computer screen. An option has been added (and enabled by default) to play a sound when new pop-ups are displayed. Currently the type of sound played is not configurable but can be changed by replacing notification.wav in the sounds folder if desired.
Support for Multiple Displays
The position of the pop-ups has always been configurable yet limited to the primary display. Now, those using multiple monitors can choose which display is used for showing the pop-ups! Just choose which monitor to use in the options dialog.
Mouse Wheel and Keyboard Navigation
You can now use the mouse wheel and arrow keys to navigate through the pop-up items. The home and end keys will also navigate to the first/last items, respectively. The escape key will close the pop-up. Note that the pop-up window must have focus for these new features to work, which is a little tricky since the pop-ups don’t steal focus (by design, of course). So you’ll have to click on them first.
In addition to these new features, several annoying bugs reported by users have been fixed.
Bug Fixes
- Fix for “No handler found for image type.” bug that occurred with malformed favicons.
- Fix for “The URL entered does not appear to be a valid RSS/Atom feed.” when the feed being added was actually valid but empty (no entries).
- Fix for never polling when multiple network adapters exist and not all are connected to the internet.
What’s Left?
Two features have not yet been implemented but are up next on the priority list. Hopefully these features will be included in the next version of Feed Notifier.
- Quiet mode – instead of popping up new items, change the system tray icon to something that will let the user know new items are available.
- Theme configuration – user configurable pop-up colors and fonts, configurable per feed.
Have any feature requests or bugs to report? Leave a comment or check out the Support page!
Feed Notifier has been listed as “Program of the Month” for February 2010 on freeware-guide.com! I didn’t even realize it had been listed as such until I saw referral traffic from there in the server logs!
In other marketing news, Feed Notifier was reviewed on freewaregenius.com, resulting in a traffic spike over the past few days. Feed Notifier has been downloaded just over 1000 times so far this month, already outpacing February’s downloads by a fair amount. Things start getting exciting when other people help spread the word… if you like Feed Notifier, write about it and let your friends know! =)
Feed Notifier 2.2 contains some exciting new features. Here are the highlights.
Keyword Filtering
Being a real-time RSS notification app, Feed Notifier is prone to flooding the user with excessive popups, even with just a handful of RSS feeds. So, we decided to add a very powerful keyword filtering feature. You can create any number of filters and each filter can be applied to all feeds or just the feeds that you select. Filters can be inclusive or exclusive and can be combined using AND, OR and NOT logic.
Check out the Keyword Filtering Guide to learn how to write your own filter rules.
Authentication Improvements
Prior to version 2.2, authenticated feeds were supported but required putting your username and password in the feed URL itself, leaving it shown in plaintext in the user interface. This was confusing and not very secure.
Now, when adding a feed, Feed Notifier will automatically detect if the feed requires authentication. If it does, it will display a username and password prompt.
The username and password cannot be changed once the feed is added. If you need to update your password, just remove and re-create the feed.
Note: The username and password may still be sent to the server in plain text format. The username and password are saved locally in an encoded format (easy to decrypt but not plain text).
Multi-Threaded Feed Polling
Prior to version 2.2, Feed Notifier would check feeds serially, one at a time. This was very inefficient, especially since most of the time is waiting for the server and the network. Now, Feed Notifier will create up to 10 worker threads to check feeds in parallel. This results in a significant performance increase. (About 4x faster when testing with 10 feeds.)
Bug Fixes
Like most software updates, this release contains a few bug fixes, so be sure to update to the latest version when you can!
No need to download a separate notification app for every service you want to subscribe to! Use Feed Notifier to get real-time twitter updates on your desktop.
Log into Twitter and you’ll see the RSS icon in the address bar. Click on it and select the feed you’d like to subscribe to. Your browser will probably ask you for your Twitter login credentials to view the feed.
Depending on your browser, follow the appropriate steps to copy the feed URL into Feed Notifier.
Because Twitter feeds are authenticated, Feed Notifier will automatically prompt you for your Twitter username and password, as shown below.
After entering your login information, you should be able to add the feed and receive twitter updates on your desktop!
Looking to make a purchase online? Feed Notifier is a great way to stay on top of craigslist and eBay updates without refreshing web pages all day long. This tip will show you how.
Get craigslist notifications on your desktop.
Subscribing to updates on craigslist is easy, because craigslist makes their RSS feeds readily visible. First, browse to your local craigslist page.
Next, find what you’re looking for. Let’s say you’re in the market for a new bike. Here’s a listing for bike sales in New York City, for example.
Once you’ve found the category you’d like to keep an eye on, just click that orange RSS icon in the address bar.
To add the feed to Feed Notifier from here, just follow the appropriate instructions on adding feeds from Firefox or Internet Explorer, depending on which browser you use.
That’s all there is to it!
Craigslist feeds can generate a lot of traffic. However, the feeds are cached and only update every 5-10 minutes. So no need in setting a polling interval much faster than every few minutes. That’s still pretty quick for getting the latest updates with such little effort!
Get eBay notifications on your desktop.
eBay is a little tricker because they practically hide their RSS feeds. But the feeds do exist and it’s not too hard once you know where to look. But first thing’s first, let’s find what we’re looking for. Still looking for a bike? Just enter your search query or select a category from the list.
A huge list of bike auctions appear, but there’s no RSS icon in the address bar. They hid it!
Scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page and you’ll see the RSS icon there. Click on it!
Now just follow the standard process for subscribing to the feed with Feed Notifier. (See the integration links in the craigslist section above if you need assistance.)
Feed Notifier is a great way to watch sites like these instead of a full-blown RSS reader because you don’t have to click through the items or make sure they all get marked as read, and you’ll see the updates as soon as they’re available. Just ignore the pop-ups if the headline doesn’t look interesting.
Feed Notifier 2.1 includes performance enhancements and a fix for occasional popup errors on Windows 7 and Vista. Version 2.1 also includes a software update feature to automatically check for new versions. The default theme was ported to pure Python code instead of HTML rendered by an Internet Explorer ActiveX control. The result is better performance, less memory overhead, no more quirky behavior on Windows 7 and better cross-platform support. A Linux release is probably not too far off (see screenshot below), but a Mac release will require tweaking some other cross-platform issues.
Feed Notifier 2.0 currently uses an Internet Explorer ActiveX control to render the popup windows. This works great but isn’t cross platform. Since 2.0 was released, I’ve been working on porting the application to use WebKit (the wxPython port of it) so that Mac and Linux support can be possible. The new code is working but there are still a few minor quirks to work out. The bottom line is that cross-platform support definitely looks feasible and shouldn’t be too far off!
