Something of an unexpected consequence of the forthcoming Safari RSS support on Tiger and Mac OS X 10.3.9 is that Safari 1.3 has changed the way it handles the feed:// URI scheme. Clicking on a feed:// link (like the RSS one at the bottom of this blog page) now produces a warning like this:

Or in other words, Safari is saying “I can’t handle these feed:// links, and I won’t let any other application handle it either”. How very useful! Before, clicking a feed:// link would open an appropriate newsreader application to subscribe to the feed. These apps generally ask permission to handle the feed:// protocol first time you run them. Will they have a choice on Tiger? I hope they change this soon.

Update: You are able to configure which application handles RSS feeds in Tiger – apparently! 😉 So, if they just sort out this Safari 1.3 situation, it will save a lot of headaches.

Update to the Update: On Surfin’ Safari, Dave Hyatt says:

The feed URL dialog that tells you 10.4 must be installed to view RSS feeds is simply a bug and not part of a master plan for global domination.

That’s a relief!

I’ve got to say, this looks promising, not to mention fantastic.

I love what Dave Watanabe has done with NewsFire and can relate to the way he works. A month or so ago, he mentioned concerns about supporting podcasting in NewsFire on his blog. He didn’t want bloat, didn’t like the metaphor mix and perhaps didn’t see the point when there are plenty of podder clients out there, but he made himself open to feedback. Clearly a creative thought process ensued and the result looks great.

I commented on Dave’s blog about this. My post was so long I felt guilty and that served as the final nail in the coffin for my “reasons not to blog”. The trouble is that support for podcasting and enclosures is still in its infancy in most newsreaders and the dedicated podder clients seem lacking in so many areas. This has created an enormous amount of unnecessary support for Feeder, where I have been dealing with problems people think are to do with their RSS feed when in fact the podder client is to blame. Most Feeder users wanted to use their existing aggregators such as NewsFire, but the support has been lacking.

In essence, all a Mac podcasting client need do is:

• Subscribe to feed.
• Check for items with audio enclosures.
• Download the enclosure files automatically or manually and optionally add them to iTunes.

This probably sounds simpler than it is, but that’s the use case scenario.

Of what I consider to be the “big three”, NetNewsWire 2, which is soon to to go final after a very long public beta, has great podcasting support – and regardless of its beta status is a wonderfully comprehensive app that manages to do everything I can think of. PulpFiction offers a different angle (and one that is very useful for mailing list feeds and the like), supports enclosures but not automatic downloading / iTunes integration. NewsFire is a superb application that shows how less really can be more, it looks as good if not better than any iApp and is so tight and polished in its implementation. I hope the podcasting side works as well as the screenshot suggests.

The great thing about this blog is I get to write about things in my applications that would otherwise remain shrouded in mystery and pretend that they are important.

Take the “Insert Image” toolbar icon in Feeder – you’d be amazed the lengths we at Reinvented Software will go to source an image. The icon is actually a scaled-down and cropped version of the photo shown below, taken at the beach in Corona Del Mar, Orange County, California in Summer 2002.

When it came to doing this toolbar icon, I was looking for a real photo to use and originally wanted a sunset or something similar to iPhoto’s icon. Although I have similar shots, some also from the same location, none of them seemed to work as well as this.

From BBC News:

The BBC is making 20 more radio shows available for listeners to download onto their digital music players. […] The programmes which will be made available as podcasts are mainly talk-based to avoid problems over music rights issues.

I reckon that one of the most underrated features of the Mac is (still) AppleScript. If you don’t already know, using AppleScript you can record and automate tasks, extend existing functionality, tie applications together and – using AppleScript Studio – even create proper standalone applications.

Here’s how it helped me lately and re-whet my appetite for adding AppleScript support to Feeder (I know, it should have been there in the first place, but it got postponed).

With Feeder, a common support problem is the FTP publishing. Not once since I replaced the CoreFoundation FTP stuff with cURL has one of these problems been an actual bug; it usually comes down to whether or not FTP Passive Mode is in use or something that I will politely term “user misunderstanding”. 😀

A big part of support is to get information from log files (e.g. your Console log or a crash log) to work out what is going on. With the FTP stuff, you don’t want to be logging all the time and Feeder doesn’t have a transcript window like real FTP clients, so I added a hidden preference to enable and disable this logging as needed.

You may already know that you can view and change an application’s preferences using the “defaults” command in the Unix shell. For example:

Using the command-line is a bit scary for many users, so I wrote a quick AppleScript to toggle Feeder’s “FTPDebug” hidden preference. You can download it here.

The script was saved as an application, so to run it you just double-click its icon. If you’ve never seen AppleScript and would like to see the code, just drag it to the Script Editor’s icon in your /Applications/AppleScript folder. You will see that it is almost English.

Yes, there’s stuff like VBScript and you can write Unix shell scripts, but I don’t think any other platform has anything as easy and powerful as AppleScript.