Proggle Blog

I have decided to delay release of the new Novobot version. The current builds work OK but not great. The reason for this is Novobot’s reliance on Microsoft Internet Explorer for displaying feed content. This makes the process of building the feed item “page” and displaying it extremely slow (and I mean, extremely as in tens of seconds to several minutes for feeds with hundreds of saved items on slow machines). Another bad thing about using MSIE WebView control is that it is next to impossible to provide a keyboard interface.

In short, the current feed display model makes for really bad user experience.

What I’m currently doing is rewriting the feed display component to not use MSIE but instead do its own drawing. The drawback is that this will not, at least initially, be a full-featured HTML feed content display. The content will be pre-processed to get rid of tags and other formatting, and will be shown as plain text. If full display is needed, you can always open the item in your web browser. The advantage is the display is extremely fast. It literally runs circles around the MSIE WebControl. And it will also be possible to use keyboard to navigate and control the feed item list.

I plan to release unstable builds for testing before the final build becomes available.

If you download and run the bleeding-edge build of Novobot, you will see that there are no more mentions of “channels” or “folders”.

Channels are now called “feeds”, the same as everywhere on the internet. I initially called them “channels” because I thought that, RSS being a new thing, users will be confused by term “feed” in the context of news. Keep in mind that Novobot was started quite a while ago. Now that every more or less savvy internet user knows what news feed means, and noone seem to remember that there was such a thing as channels in Microsoft Internet Explorer that you could define to have bookmarked pages updated automatically, it makes sense to me to call Novobot channels “feeds”.

Folders in Novobot always behaved like tags. You could add a channel to multiple folders, in other words, assign multiple tags to it. The root, Library, item showed all channels in the database. And you could build nested folder hierarchy. While extremely flexible, this feature could also become very confusing. I have decided to call folders by their real name, what they have always been, tags. I have also decided to keep all tags in one-level sorted list. In my view this is simpler and more manageable than having multilevel folder hierarchies. Of course, time and users will tell if I was right on this one.

The folders-to-tags change brought a not-so-easy task of dealing with existing folder hierarchies Novobot users might have. My solution was to initially display all tags using their full hierarchical names and allow users to rename them as they se fit. Once renamed, tags lose their ancestry and are moved to the root of the tag hierarchy. In other words, as you rename your old multi-level folders to have more tag-like names, the entire folder hierarchy disappears and becomes a flat list of tags.

Example: if you had a folder /News/UK/London, the tag list will show its full name, including parent folders, in a list like this:

News
News/UK
News/UK/London

Now if you rename the two hierarchical tags to be more like tags, the list might look like this:

News
London
UK

The renamed tags will retain any feeds they had before the renaming.

I hope these changes will not cause problems to the existing users.

I’ve posted the current (trunk) Novobot build on the Beta page. It is not yet production-ready, not even at beta stage. The purpose is to simplify testing and allow people to experience Novobot as it is built. Not sure if anyone will want that though. Oh yes, there is a catch: I plan to make the trunk Novobot build free to use—no trials or serial number checks. It’s an incentive for those brave souls who risk their data and sanity to test-drive buggy and unstable cutting-edge builds. I’m not sure yet how this will work out for the stable shareware version, but I’m willing to try. So, watch this space.