{"id":196,"date":"2006-03-18T22:01:55","date_gmt":"2006-03-18T22:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/18\/feeder-13\/"},"modified":"2008-02-13T05:15:52","modified_gmt":"2008-02-13T05:15:52","slug":"feeder-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/18\/feeder-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeder 1.3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I released Feeder 1.3 yesterday and while the <a href=\"http:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/feeder\/downloads\/index.html\">release notes<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/news\/\">news page<\/a> give an overview of what has changed, a proper explanation of the major new features requires more than a single bullet point.<\/p>\n<p>In a nutshell, this release is about making life quicker and easier for both podcasters and regular feed creators, improving publishing support so that it&#8217;s easier to understand while being vastly more flexible and revisiting almost all of the application to make it look, work and feel better than ever.<\/p>\n<p>I plan to take a closer look at some of the major new features on this blog to explain more about them and mention some tips and tricks hiding in the app. I will also be setting up a dedicated feed for these and other such articles. <\/p>\n<p><!--In the meantime, the rest of this post tells some of the story behind this release simply so that I can get things off my chest!\n\nI started working on this version last October with the hope of releasing it before the year was out. Some of these changes have been a long time coming and there are a number of reasons for that. The first is that Feeder is a very support-heavy application because there are so many things I can't control.\n\nI can't control the behaviour of the iTunes Music Store, FTP servers come in all sorts of incompatible shapes and sizes, web servers do funny things sometimes, some other applications generate really bad, buggy RSS feeds that Feeder can't import and applications that consume feeds, particularly browsers like Safari and Firefox, all have their own little quirks. \n\nOn average I probably spend around 50% of my time supporting Feeder and that is time not spent developing new functionality or even doing minor updates for both my applications. I'm not complaining - it's just part of the deal - but it was a surprise when I actually worked out how much of my time I spend on these things. \n\nThe second reason is that a lot of these changes needed to be bundled together for me to be able to do them properly. Normally I prefer to take a drip-drip approach, delivering changes with each minor update, but that was not appropriate for the majority of stuff in this release.\n\nI also have needed to think really hard about everything in this release and in many cases rethink it. I could easily have released something that did the Windows thing of ticking all the boxes but was a pain to use. I could also have easily released something I would sorely live to regret. Once you add some features it's very difficult to take them out again. \n\nI have enough code for another 1.3-sized release sitting in a folder named \"Unused Source Code\". Some of these I attempted because a small band of people were making a large amount of noise asking for things that don't really fit the app, others seemed like a good idea until I saw them in action and yet more I culled because they weren't essential and I wanted to focus my attention on the important stuff.--><\/p>\n<p>Lastly, I really couldn&#8217;t release Feeder with my web site the way it was. The old design was actually my prototype from July 2004 when I first launched the business. I did a mockup in Photoshop, sliced up the images and slapped on some hurriedly written text figuring I could do it again properly a couple of months down the line. It was the difference between constructing a site in a day or two rather than spending a whole week on it.<\/p>\n<p>It is always the way in IT that workarounds and stopgap measures instantly become permanent features and it&#8217;s much harder to undo them later. The new version of the site is faster, more compact, much more standards compliant (still working on some minor issues there) and just more up to date. I hope to make this blog match the main site, but if that sounds familiar I wrote <a href=\"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/15\/confessions-of-a-cocoaholic\/\">the exact same thing just over a year ago<\/a>. So don&#8217;t hold your breath.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update March 22:<\/b> I did the blog redesign. Whatever next! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I released Feeder 1.3 yesterday and while the release notes and news page give an overview of what has changed, a proper explanation of the major new features requires more than a single bullet point. In a nutshell, this release is about making life quicker and easier for both podcasters and regular feed creators, improving [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feeder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reinventedsoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}