Feeder got another mention in Episode 21 of This Week in Tech – the one recorded live in the SF Apple Store. Both the mention and the whole live TWiT thing are very cool.

Feeder 1.2.1 is released today and about time too as far as I’m concerned, not that anyone has complained. I don’t normally add new functionality to x.x.x releases, but with the previous release (v1.2) I tried to get the iTunes functionality out there as soon as it was ready, to quell the endless emails of desperation. That meant postponing some of the things I originally wanted to include such as file publishing and AppleScript.

File publishing appears in 1.2.1 but I still haven’t got the AppleScript support in there. I did start it, but it was taking much longer than I expected so I thought it better to get the release with my tweaks and fixes out there now. AppleScript support is not high on the request list but it is something I think is sorely lacking right now. It’s also been good to let the iTunes stuff settle and I’ve added and improved on apsects of that functionality based on feedback and my own judgement.

The rest of the originally planned 1.2 release will go into a 1.3 release due towards the end of this year, along with some more cool new features that should make their first public appearance at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California this coming November. 😀

In other Feeder news, it was great to hear This Week in Tech‘s Leo Laporte sing Feeder’s praises in his interview with Adam Christianson on a special edition of the MacCast – thanks again to Adam, he is also a big Feeder fan and I’ve had a ton of hits from his site over the last month or so. You can find that episode here.

Finally, Feeder appears in the September issue of SVM Mac in France and a PDF version of the article is available here. This is the first appearance of Feeder 1.2 in the press. Vive la France!

#4243867 – Safari’s RSS viewer uses GUID as Read More link when isPermaLink is false.

I’ve joined in the fun with Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday, the gist of mine being that Safari’s RSS viewer will use the value of an item’s GUID when its isPermaLink attribute is “false”. Only when isPermaLink is true or the isPermaLink attribute is omitted should the value of the guid tag be considered a URL according to the RSS spec.

I had a couple of reports from Feeder users that this was happening to their feeds in Safari. By default, Feeder generates GUIDs to help newsreaders uniquely identify items in a feed. This can be disabled (in the Feed Settings drawer) but won’t solve the problem for existing items; a better workaround is to give each item in a feed an Article Link, even if it’s just to your home page.

You can see other reported bugs on the applebugfriday tag on del.icio.us.

Podcast Solutions by Dan Klass (The Bitterest Pill) and Michael Goeghegan (Reel Reviews, Grape Radio) is released today, August 22nd.

Feeder appears in the book and on the accompanying CD – although thanks to deadlines it’s version 1.1 on the CD, not 1.2 with the iTunes functionality. I know that the authors managed to include information about iTunes 4.9 podcasting features and, as far as Feeder is concerned, it checks for new versions by default on the first launch.

Anyway, good luck to Dan and Michael with the book and if you are interested in podcasting, check it out.

A couple of days ago, I wrote to extol the virtues of supportive users whose valuable feedback helps make software better for everyone. I decided to omit mentioning my pet hate, which is people who take the time to post terrible reviews of your software on download web sites without bothering to take the time to get in touch with you first. I should have, because a couple of days afterwards it happened again.

Take this review on MacUpdate:

My Podcast feed is up on my server and I’m now at episode 12, so I know the feed is alright and works, however when having feeder download the xml file it will always fail.

Such a shame, I looked like a useful piece of software. (8/18/2005, Version: 1.2)

…. and 1 star for everything: Features, Ease of Use, Value and Stability.

Developers don’t get notified when people post reviews of their software, although both VersionTracker and MacUpdate have recently started providing RSS feeds for your products’ ratings. These are only updated when the rating changes, some people post comments without ratings and in all cases you have no way of getting in touch with the reviewer personally to try to get to the bottom of it. Indie developers need to have a thick skin about this stuff and as such I don’t always reply, but this one was so petty that I did:

There could be lots of reasons for this: the feed could be invalid or the wrong format, the URL entered could be incorrect and it could be a bug, but since it works for most people it’s obviously something peculiar to your feed.

Unless people get in touch with developers about problems like this, there is no way of us knowing and thus no way the situation will be remedied.

Also, this is clearly a convenience feature and hardly sums up the entire functionality of the application.

It does indeed work most of the time, but I know of a few things that prevent Feeder from downloading feeds that I’m fixing in Feeder 1.2.1:

• Feeder can’t seem to decode the compressed feed returned by FeedBurner right now. Update: It turns out that no matter what you try to set for the Accept-Encoding HTTP header when using NSURLRequest, it will be ignored and “gzip, deflate” sent instead. I’ve reworked much of Feeder’s feed autodetection and download code for 1.2.1 and somewhere along the line have solved the problem of dealing with compressed data. Thanks also to Eric (see comments) for getting in touch.
• iTunes feeds with invalid iTunes categories can’t be read by Feeder 1.2.
• Feeder can’t always autodetect feeds on non-XHTML web pages.

I only know about these problems because people have got in touch, I have quick and easy workarounds for anyone who falls foul of them right now. Maybe if this person had done the same I would have another thing on my list and they would have a workaround.

If their feed was invalid I would have fixed it by hand and sent it back – Feeder can’t parse invalid XML because Apple’s XML parser bales out, but that’s perfectly reasonable. Ironically, Apple’s own iTunes is pretty liberal about this stuff, much to the horror of the people out there who care, because it helps propagate exactly these sorts of problems. Also Feeder can’t parse RSS 1.0 (RDF) or Atom feeds because they are completely different formats to RSS 0.9x and 2.0.

If anyone has a problem with Feeder, they can send feedback from my site or within the app and be assured of a quick response, often within the hour and usually no later than 24 hours. Unlike an anonymous comment on a download site, that really does help everyone.