Work Begins on Cyndicate 2.0
Posted December 20th, 2009 @ 10:33am by Erik J. Barzeski
Work has begun on Cyndicate 2.0.
New features already in place include:
- New article fetch system is in place. Much faster, and now processing of feeds is offloaded to an NSOperation to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, so new feeds will queue up for fetching while already fetched feeds are in the processing queue.
- Fully 64-bit. All code updated to Objective-C 2.0, and things like fast enumeration are being used everywhere.
- Removal of the auto-rating. It was great, but not many people seem to have used it.
So that's two things. Things we're considering adding ((i.e. we don't want to promise them in case we think of something better, etc.)) include:
- Google Reader syncing.
- Redoing smart folders. Some fundamental issues with the way they work now, including a crash I get fairly often. They're expensive to load right now and don't scale all that well.
- Support for nested logic in filters and smart folders - ((A and B) or C) type stuff. Apple added some UI elements in 10.5 to support this.
- We're looking to release a free ad-supported version as well, but need to find an ad network happy to serve up advertisements for us. Anyone?
Beyond that, we're open to suggestions. Anyone?
Donate Life
Posted 21 Dec 2009 at 10:46am #
One feature i'd like is an "orphaned articles" smart folder. that is, any articles that don't belong to feeds currently in Cyndicate.
Otherwise, I really love Cyndicate.
Google Reader sync means nothing to me.
Posted 21 Dec 2009 at 2:36pm #
One additional note that I forgot to bring up while talking about the changes with Erik. Cyndicate 2.0 will require 10.6 Snow Leopard. Some of the new changes are being done by taking advantage of new items in the OS. This shouldn't affect many users. Last time I looked, less than 0.5% of users were on either 10.4 or a PPC and over 50% of the Intel users had already upgraded to 10.6.
Daniel, the orphaned article rule for smart folders might be possible. Redoing the way smart folders work is the next item on the list. I'll take a look at adding it while doing that. No promises yet that it'll be added, but I'll definitely take a look at it.
Posted 21 Dec 2009 at 4:52pm #
Speeding up the fetching would be great. Also the start-up can be really slow before the main window comes up (maybe 20 seconds). Might be the size of my database (256.5MB). The whole app is very sluggish until fetching is done. I tend to give it time to get on with business before using it. I do have the maximum connections set at 10 so perhaps that's the problem.
Is there a way to make it work with Mail better? When I e-mail an article the article looses all extra lines between paragraphs so I have to manually fix them each time by inserting extra returns. Also, any graphics in the article are lost.
I agree with dropping the auto-rating. I keep it turned off but somehow articles still get ratings from time to time. I need to check if this on particular feeds.
Now you guys have me trying to make notes of all the quarky things I've filed away in the back of my head.
If you are putting together a beta group again, I'd be happy to serve as I did on the first one.
Posted 21 Dec 2009 at 7:04pm #
[quote comment="56506"]If you are putting together a beta group again, I'd be happy to serve as I did on the first one.[/quote]
Yep, we'll have a beta in the spring or late winter. Email me if you'd like an early look, Scott.
Posted 21 Dec 2009 at 11:23pm #
I'd suggest http://decknetwork.net/ for the ads
Posted 23 Jan 2010 at 4:22pm #
[...] on Cyndicate 2.0 continues. We've shipped a few alphas that speed things up and remove some memory [...]