Mac Classic | Internet Utilities | AmphetaDesk

AmphetaDesk - 0.91

Syndicated news / headline reader

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All Time:	(5.0)
Version 0.91:	(5.0)
Selected Version:	0.91
Release Date:	2001-07-13
License:	Freeware
Downloads (version 0.91):	391
Downloads (all versions):	8,203

Information Related to Version:

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Product Description:

AmphetaDesk is a news aggregator - it sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage. With thousands of channels for selection, AmphetaDesk can shave hours off your day - and you'll look smart to all your friends! Egotism never had it better!

What's new in this version:

fixed bug where we wouldn't close if our child process was still hanging around (caused by forking to run a browser different than the default and then not killing the bastard).
fixed a silly bug that stopped encoded characters in a URL from being accepted as part of a typed website address for the "add an unknown channel" feature. this fix makes NewsIsFree.com integration possible (and nifty!).
AmphetaDesk no longer crashes when Opera has been set as the default browser (it worked fine when the path to Opera was specified in mySettings.xml). The bug was caused by Opera's reliance on Multiple Document Interface (or so some more knowledgable people have told me).
finally stopped resizing in the Windows gui.
added right click menu to the systray icon for the Windows gui.
added "refresh channels" and "open window" to the systray icon for the Windows gui. and "exit" too, but that's boring.
fixed some minor template problems with new channel listings.
fixed a minor template form issue with Mozilla.
changed the default letter to "0" in the "add a channel" page. that just makes more sense, since it's first in our nav.
updated the three master channel lists.
fixed bug in version check code that would get confused with different types of line returns in the Macintosh version.
we now check for duplicate entries in the "add a channel" list based on xml url, not the title as we had previously done. this fixes an obscure bug where channels with the same name would be lumped (and by default, checked) into one entry.
stderr is now redirected to our logfile. we also sleep after spitting out any message for 10 seconds so that the DOS window on Windows doesn't disappear too quickly.
moved most of the divider lines into the respective routines.
added a lot more logging information to help debug.
added an error message for when the webserver dies. this lets the Windows 2000 people know what the problem is and that we know about it.
in our &process_initial_request routine, we know check to see if $url is defined before sending the results back. if $url is undefined, we set it to the main page of AmphetaDesk (which should work around some random browser idiocies when it actually makes a request to the server, but a url can't be determined).
server timeouts have been removed from &head and &get, as well the timeout was lowered from 20 seconds to 10 seconds.
we now print out the remote server headers if it doesn't contain Content-Length or Last-Modified headers. that's just weird.
Added $TEMPLATE->{total_my_channels}, $TEMPLATE->{total_channel_items}, and $TEMPLATE->{total_channels} which just provide various counts. Find more information in the skinning.htm documentation.
Some minor template changes after usability testing - removed some of the more obscure terms, added some more whitespace, and duplicated the navigation at the bottom of the page. Eventually, they'll be a template that will remove all this "helpful" crap for people who know it all.
Reduced the head() request to 512 bytes, instead of 2096.
Added {app}->{url} into all HTTP User-Agent lines.
Our checks for server headers in head() are now case insensitive.

Operating System Requirements:

This product is designed to run on the following operating systems:

Mac OS Classic

Additional Requirements:

Mac OS X 10.4 PPC
Mac OS X 10.3.9
Mac OS X 10.4 Intel
Mac OS X 10.0
Mac OS X 10.1
Mac OS X 10.5 PPC
Mac OS X 10.2
Mac OS X 10.5 Intel
Mac OS X 10.3
Mac OS Classic

Feedback Summary:

Version 0.91:
Overall Rating:	(5.0)	Features:	Not rated (0.0)	Support:	Not rated (0.0)
Ease of Use:	Not rated (0.0)	Quality / Stability:	Not rated (0.0)	Price:	Not rated (0.0)