[BETA] Neowin News Tray

[ceminess]

your test build didn't work, i tried messing around with my router a bit and still nothing worked,

if i don't click the okay button on the error message and i right click on the N icon it won't show any news or something, so it is like it can't access the internet.

is there a way i can change what port it uses, that might change something.?

[azcodemonkey]

Hmm... are you running XP SP 1? < I know, I'm taking stabs here > :blink: Are you running a firewall like ZoneAlarm, or Norton? There isn't a way to change the port. HTTP runs on port 80, so I still contend that if you can access the web, this should work, but I will keep digging to see what I can find.

[ceminess]

yes xp pro with sp1 and yes i am running zonealarm but i shut it down when i ran it and still the same thing.

[DCom]

Tested on:

Windows 98se + IE 6 SP1

NewsTray loads, places itself on the tray, then quits.

After installing MSXML 3:

Same result. The icon stays on the tray until mouse is moved over it, then it dissapears (no biggie, gdi prob) . An instance is not found in running processes. Prog just runs, then unloads itself. no crash or hang.

Consider this the first "flood" of win98 compatibility requests ;)

[azcodemonkey]

Consider this the first "flood" of win98 compatibility requests ;)

:cry:

I'm pretty much set against supporting 9x, unfortunately. 9x doesn't support Unicode very well, which adds a lot of instability. I would have to rewrite the HTTP handler to use WinInet, which looks like it would suck, and considering that I'm writing this in my spare time, it would be a while before it happens, if at all. Not only that, I have no 9x machine to test on, which makes things evermore difficult. Trying to debug something through an end-user is not even remotely feasible.

I'd be more apt to port this to Linux than write for 9x.

Once I've "finished" this thing to a reasonable conclusion, the source is going to become public domain. If there is a big enough push for 9x compatibility, someone else is going to have to write it.

Sorry to have to break that to you. I'll get a little more time to work on this in August, which means I'll probably have another stable release and will more than likely have a final before September.

Honestly, this isn't that hard of an app to write, so I could forsee someone taking the source to make it 9x compatible soon after it's released. I'm doing my best to abstract the essential components enough to make for easy maintenance.

Thanks for your interest.

[azcodemonkey]

Ok, there may be hope for the 9x'ers. If I can get the runtime memory down for a .NET version of this app, I'll probably go with that, so you'll get to play with it. :D

[azcodemonkey]

OK, some news. I've gotten the .NET version of this close to presentable last night. Thanks to dannysmurf for giving me the impetus to try the SetProcessWorkingSetSize function to reduce memory consumption. It works almost too good... :shifty: Average memory consumption drops to around 1-2MB, sometimes lower... in debug mode.

This should hopefully solve the 9x issue.

Features/Changes:

• - Proxy support is being added.
  - Visual configuration is being added.
  - News items are no longer being placed at the top of the dialog, but are made a submenu of the news feed. - this may be configurable if requested -
  - No balloons anymore. Working on an Messenger-ish slide down window with clickable links for news notifications.
  - Xml is parsed with XmlTextReader, so no DOM overhead, except when saving settings.
  - Considering skinning options for menu, tray icon, and slide down window.
  - Going to eliminate those html escapes... eventually.
  

Any other ideas?

[macman87]

nice program... really cool...

[DCom]

weenur, thats music to my ears :) Im keeping an eye on this thread for the win98 release.

[blackice912 Veteran]

My taskbar loves this little program. I'll be monitoring this thread and posting any glitches I run into (If any). :)

[Guest Quick Reply]

still looking good, PM me for me to test it on windows 98se since you say that you don't have access to 9x ;)

[[hxc]]

where the hell have i been? i want this!! :yes:

[ceminess]

must have an update, i need to know what's going on :p

i know we lost some of this thread sense neowin got formatted, but it has still been a while sense an update.

[azcodemonkey]

Update: I'm stuck in limbo and can't get out! Ok, maybe not limbo, but I've been overwhelmingly busy in the past month with work, and now I have school to contend with as well. However, things are settling enough to where I can get some work done on NNT. I'll post a more complete update later this weekend, and possibly - if everything goes well - a new link. :) I did lose my source code, so I had rewrite the .NET version completely.

[azcodemonkey]

Well, things didn't go as I had hoped. The main thing is developing a parser that's generic enough to handle extended RSS metadata so the app can be used for feeds other than Neowin. Neowin uses a very simple metadata, whereas Slashdot has very extensive metadata that can be leveraged. I'd like to have the metadata that is exposed be user configurable, too.

I'm also trying to get a decent object model, which I think I finally acheived.

I'll give another update later this week.

[sgtLENIN]

url dont work :(

[azcodemonkey]

url dont work :(

Yeah, sorry. I took down the original due to a baaaad, baaaad bug I should have caught before I released it. Since then, my hard drive crashed and I lost what work I had done. I'm getting closer to a beta release... again. lol

[sgtLENIN]

hehe.. okay ;)

[ceminess]

any news on a beta release yet. it has been about a month.

[itsnotabigtruck]

weenur, PM me for a .NET RSS DLL I made. It supports to the letter the RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 standards (both ones using RDF and ones without). It is more complete than some other implementations because it supports RSS modules. That would make it easier to leverage Slashdot metadata.

[azcodemonkey]

any news on a beta release yet. it has been about a month.

It's still coming. I've had a large project that I've actually been paid to do that has been taking all my time, as well as school. I'm going through the beta phase on the project, so it should be mostly bug fixes and ui changes for the client.

I've been working on the news tray a little at a time over the past month. I've done a lot of unit testing, which is pretty rare for me. ;) Trying to pick up some better coding habits. I'd like to make this news reader flexible enough for other feeds, and easy to configure. I want to get this sucker done as much as some would like to see it done. :)

[Daniel F. Administrators]

moved to Software (Branding) Contribution

[AcdShdw]

bad link

[blade2deep]

Sorry azcodemonkey but the link is not working could you provide a new link ?

Thank you gladly appreciate

[-Alex-]

Haven't you noticed that EVERY thread you've replied to has been dead for 4 bloody years?!