Two new styles are up at the Download page: Mono and Mono Mail. Thanks to Tim Stalin. To use the styles, just download them then double-click the zip file to extract the style package. Then double-click the style package to automatically install it into Vienna or drag and drop the style package onto the Vienna icon in the dock.

The trunk for 2.1.0 is now active:

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vienna-rss/trunk/2.1.0

If you're doing feature development for Vienna, use the above command to enlist and code against that rather than the 2.0.0 trunk. Remember that 2.0.0 is now for crucial bug fixes only.

The first 2.1.0 build number will be 2100. This gives me plenty of space between 2027 (the most recent 2.0.1 build) and 2099 to be used by all the potential 2.0.x builds before 2.1 is released. I don't anticipate that I'll hit the limit.

After one false start due to mis-typed binary files (fixed with judicious use of cvs admin -kb) in the CVS repository, the Vienna source has finally migrated to the new Subversion system on SourceForge. The net result is better source revision management which should make life much easier for me.

The instructions for enlisting into the Vienna source repository have been updated at:

http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna_dev.html

Now, on with 2.0.1 and the next build.

I'm officially on holiday until the end of the month. However in between wading through all 26 hours of Der Zweite Heimat, work on 2.0.1 continues apace. Here is what we have so far:

• Universal binary build.
• Updated to Growl 0.7.4.
• No longer prompt if Vienna is exited while a connection is in progress.
• Better truncation of feed names in the folder list. (Code contributed by David Kocher).
• Handle HTML redirects in the feed for sources such as MSN Spaces.
• Save and restore the currently selected article when you exit and restart Vienna.
• Support use of the Shift key to open a link in the alternate browser. (Code contributed by Jeffrey Johnson).
• Added Japanese localisation. (Thanks to Daisuke Okada).
• Added Spanish localisation. (Thanks to Carlos Morales).

The increase in the number of localisations has also forced me to do some restructuring of the resources to make it easier to add new UI elements without having to duplicate in every single localised file except one. Otherwise something as simple as moving a menu command ends up being duplicated in at least seven source files with the added risk of breaking the command assignment. Not good.

When you start Vienna with a clean database, it adds a couple of sample feeds to get you started. I'd like to add a few more.

So... recommendations please for sample feeds to add in 2.0.1. The criteria are: it shouldn't be a secured feed, should have universal appeal (i.e. no controversial sites) and ideally the URL isn't likely to change in the next few months.

I've just committed changes to CVS that will go into build 2026 which will be the first build of 2.0.1. The changes are:

- Universal binary build.
- Updated to Growl 0.7.4.
- No longer prompt if Vienna is exited while a connection is in progress.
- Better truncation of feed names in the folder list. (Code contributed by David Kocher).
- Handle HTML redirects in the feed for sources such as MSN Spaces.
- Save and restore the currently selected article when you exit and restart Vienna.

If you have XCode you can build the code yourself.

I'm not sure most people will have noticed, and that was intentional, but I quietly moved build 2025 to public release status last night. What that means is that the text on the Vienna web site no longer refer to Vienna being in pre-release status and I've moved a copy of the build into the Released Versions package on SourceForge. The pre-release versions are still there and will stay there. In short, after 9 months of active development, Vienna is officially released.

So why no fanfare? For one thing, I'm still not set up to handle a major influx of users should that ever happen. I'm a one-man band with no support team and a day-time job that pays for the tea and biscuits. Since I don't rely on Vienna to support myself beyond what little I get via the PayPal link, I can afford to allow it to dribble out over time and hope that any of the more egrarious bugs that slipped by can be caught earlier with a smaller user base.

On the other hand, there's value in moving Vienna into release status. Some folks have an aversion to running pre-release software so this simply plays sop with their comfort level. And having a release version provides a cushion while work continues on newer versions. If something breaks in build 2026 or later, the fix is to drop back to 2025 which is a known quantity. And finally, a release status is provenance that an open source and freeware project can achieve closure which can do nothing but hopefully enhance Vienna's status in the eyes of those who see OSS as a twilight of software products that never seem to get to the final gate.

That said, feel free to spread the word that Vienna 2.0 is out there!

(Another key change is that Check for Updates on release builds will not trigger on pre-release builds. Instead you'll need to download the next pre-release build directly and that will trigger on future pre-release builds using a different check site.)

Anyway, I'm off on holiday in a few days and I plan to use the time to relax and start doing some design work on the major 2.1 features. There will be a 2.0.1 update in a month or so with additional localisation that are being worked on as I speak, a fix for the MSN Space HTML redirect that was too late for 2.0 and possibly Universal Binary.

Thanks to everybody who helped to test Vienna 2.0 all these long months and especially those dedicated band of localisers and the folks who contributed custom styles and scripts.

I don't have a MacIntel machine owing to a paucity of funds in my coin jar so I popped into the local Apple Store and ran a UB build of Vienna 2.1 on one of the Intel iMacs there. It worked fine. I even lipo'd out the ppc arch portion to make sure it wasn't somehow running that through Rosetta. Still worked fine. So I'm pleased about that.

The HTML redirect problem that is affecting some MSN Spaces feeds is also fixed as a result of some early morning debugging and coding. Both this and the UB changes will probably get back-ported to the 2.01 version.

And I think there's some sort of major football (?) game going on in the USA at the moment. :-)

Przemek Bojarowski, a digital designer from Poland, kindly donated a couple of icons for Vienna. I thought they were interesting enough to consider as a replacements for the main Vienna icon in 2.1. I'd be interested in what other people think. Here they are:

Now that build 2025 looks to be the final release build of 2.0, I've decided to make a start on coding on 2.1. As always, crucial bug fixes to the 2.0 code base will take priority. However I expect that to be done to the 2.0 branch while 2.1 will remain separate other than porting across the 2.0 bug fixes as appropriate.

So first out of the gate: 2.1 is Universal Binary by default. That means SQLite is rolled into the build as sources rather than as a static library. (And, before anybody asks, the reason I'm not using libsqlite.dylib is because that is only available on 10.4 and later). The other external dependency is support for Growl and now that 0.7.4 itself is supplied as a Universal Binary, I've upgraded to that. So now 2.1 should build and run on MacIntel machines as native i386 code.

The other change I've added is support for pop-up window blocking in the tabbed browser. By default, all pop-up windows are blocked unless the "Block pop-up windows" setting is turned off in the General Preferences. The Alt key can be held down when clicking on a link to override the current setting.

And I've added separate "Ascending" and "Descending" commands to the end of the View/Sort menu to explicitly state the sort order. In 2.0 you toggled between the two by selecting the sort column again. This confused some people.

None of this is in CVS yet. SourceForge have finally got around to supporting Subversion and that is due for release this month. So the 2.0 and 2.1 codebase will be migrating to Subversion as soon as it is ready. Instructions for enlisting will be on the Vienna developer web page and thanks for Subversion's support for file links and libsqlite3.a going away, the enlistment instructions will actually be a little simpler than for CVS.

So that's where we're at right now. No big changes in the UI yet. That, along with sync support, needs more up-front design work and planning first.

I used to have a blog here but it somehow got lost in the site redesign. I still have some of the articles and I'll probably repost them here again but that isn't the main reason for lighting a fire here. Rather I thought it would be a good idea to have somewhere to record the gradual progress of work on Vienna 2.1 and this seemed to be as good a place as any.