GeekyGoodnessSoftware Developer

Hey guys/girls

Since launching the beta a few days ago, I have had a great response from you, 99% positive feedback and great bug reporting.

I try to reply to as many emails as I can, so sorry if I have not replied to you yet!

Caffeinated took a bigger leap tonight, with many bugs hopefully fixed and gains the first “Social Plugin” – Instapaper!

Caffeinated unlike most readers out there has its own plugin API, which…you can use! ( If you know Objective-C ), although in early stages, I hope this just gives a general direction that yes I have not left out social networking and posting of links to places :).

Currently only way to post an item to somewhere is to right click on the table cell and choose, other menu’s / shortcuts will be added in later versions. But right now I would love all the Instapaper users out there to see how robust it is and to find bugs!.

Bugs I believe I have fixed – correct me if im wrong :

• Outline view – open folders not drawing background properly
• Unread count not syncing properly
• Foreign characters in fonts – can someone check please?
• Starred items being deleted
• Unread items being deleted
• Refreshing – syncing from wake up / loss of net connection – ( have not fully tested this one )

and many more smaller issues.

I still have many bugs people have sent in that I have yet to fix, but it all takes time.

Find the link to the new beta below :

Click to download

Also be sure to follow @caffeinatedapp on Twitter for regular updates.

Thanks

Curtis

UPDATE: For the latest beta, please check here

Hello!, its been a while since I have posted about Caffeinated, but you should be happy to know the first beta is available…today!

Caffeinated is no way near finished, from when I started last year, the version that most of you saw on Macstories has been completely rewritten from scratch. The whole idea was having a beautiful UI for such a simple task of reading your items from Google Reader. Caffeinated will not be a “how many functions can you stick into an application” app, its sole purpose is to be fast and efficient at pulling and reading your items from Google Reader.

Caffeinated for all you geeky people runs on a custom syncing framework and uses CoreData + GCD alot!

Heres a few things that you are probably going to look for but wont find because they have yet to come!

• Subscription Management – its part build already…, its buggy…
• Search – yet to figure out best way of doing it…
• Social Networking – yes it will be coming, the framework is already in place – this includes things like post to Instapaper, Facebook and so on…
• Icons – they will change, have to put up with the same RSS icon for the time being down the left.

There are a few known bugs in this release, but it should be perfectly fine to use and shouldnt crash – I hope! Few issues such as :

• WebView title drawing under the close button
• Outlineview sometimes decides it doesnt want to draw the expanded folder inset colours and lines
• The iOS style scrollbars sometimes flicker
• Flash causes the UI to hang momentarily – FU Flash FU
• WebKit sometimes wont display the red badge until its redrawn – beats me why…

List goes on…,

Caffeinated was built for speed and customisability. The app is theme-able, the API exists but I have yet to write documentation or build in appropriate preferences, if you are interested in themeing with this beta, just give me a shout and I can walk you through it – its really not that difficult :).

This is mainly a usable taster of what is to come…so be patient ( I know you have already! ) but it will be worth the wait in the end.

Click to download

Any bugs found please email to :

bugs@caffeinatedapp.com

Please do not email feature requests, only bugs – main ones i’m looking for are with syncing issues, if any.

Dont hurt me :D

Thanks

Curtis

Hello,

This is just a quick post about Caffeinated. Some of you may have been following @caffeinatedapp for a long time now, since is started off and are curious to why its taking so long to get something into your hands. Firstly, some of you regard to “us” as “team”, when in-fact there is only one of me :D. Due to being a Web Developer as a job, I only get my evenings / weekends to actually develop the app, this can prove difficult at times due to staring at a screen all day then coming home and the last thing I want to do is continue staring at another screen. Im also a hardcore gamer, so it works around me caining games aswell.

Caffeinated is coming along at a steady pace, I will not rush it to get it into your hands faster, I just want it to be the most beautiful RSS reader there is with a community behind it with plugins and themes, but as you know it takes time. Bare with me guys / girls, im sure it will be worth the wait ;)

Curtis

Hello Folks!

I thought I would do a quick post on how I achieved the “overlaying” NSOutlineView effect within Caffeinated.

Im not going to provide source, meerly the thought process behind it. So here it goes.

Its made up of 2 NSOutlineViews, one embedded within the others NSScrollView. The main NSOutlineView has a custom cell at the top of it which is the same height as the overlaying NSOutlineView. Due to the fact the overlaying NSOutlineView is wrapped within a NSScrollView, you must subclass its scrollview to forward the scrolling events on to its superview – superview, so 2 levels up the display list. Another problem will occur when the main NSScrollView redisplays the main NSOutlineView, this will cause the cells within the main NSOutlineView to draw over the top of the overlaying NSOutlineView. To get around this problem we observe the main NSScrollView for its scrolling notification and redraw the overlaying NSOutlineView when it has been posted.

Another thing you will notice is the shadow and the indent lines. This is meerly produced by subclassing the NSOutlineView class and overriding its drawRect methods and drawing the indent lines. How the shadow works is just by drawing an image below the overlaying NSOutlineView, with custom methods in the delegate, you can easily turn the shadow on and off.

Next part is overriding the keyboard events within the NSOutlineView, so that both of the views act as one when reaching the first and last item within them and selecting the appropriate view. Its actually pretty simple once you get your head around the concept. It does require you to type a fair bit of code, but its worth it ;)

Hope this helps anyone.

Today I had come across a weird problem / bug with good old Internet Explorer. I have a custom file uploader created with ActionScript and works fine in pretty much every browser, even IE…well, if you only want to use it once.

The problem is, Internet Explorer ( bless its cotton socks ) doesn’t like you loading the same swf file into the document dynamically over and over again. It will meerly use a cached file, so whatever you inject into the Flash movie when its loaded is stored and IE will constantly use this movie until you close the browser.

The solution? Very simple…meery wack a timestamp on the end of the file you wish to include…like this :

'mymovie.swf?time=' + new Date().getTime();

Thus Internet Explorer will think its a completely new file and load that bad boy in again!

Once again IE has made me spend endless hours on pointless bulls**t.