Subscribing to feeds from a browser

[Tim Colson]

I went to a feed in Firefox on Windows and selected the Apprise.exe as
my newsreader. Apprise launches, but seems oblivious as to why it has
been summoned into existence.

I tried this on OS X, setting my preferred RSS reader to the Apprise
app... same thing happens. FireFox on OS X doesn't even launch Apprise
when I select it manually. :-(


This is a bit of a deal breaker for widespread usage in, for example
only, a big company.

Simple fix or complicated because of the AIR + Native App integration?

For bonus points... I notice that the Vienna RSS reader on OS X
automatically shows up in the Default RSS Reader drop-down in Safari
and the "Subscribe to this feed using" drop-down in Firefox. It
doesn't even have an installer, it's a single app package.

What mojo does Vienna posses that Apprise (all AIR apps?) lacks?
Simple to fix, or complicated and painful due to the AIR-based app?

Cheers,
-Timo

[Dan]

Timo,

Thanks for the comments. That's a good suggestion, and I'll add that
feature. AIR provides a simple way to grab that information (in this
case the URL the browser summons it with). I'll look into being able
to register it as the default feed reader as well, and the issue with
Firefox on OS X not launching the app at all.

Thanks,
Dan

[Tim Colson]

Hey Dan -- I had a colleague say that subscribing is starting to work
for them... so perhaps you've made some progress? (Or perhaps the
issue wasn't reproducible beyond my machine?)

Cheers!
-Timo

[Dan]

Hi Timo,

One of the features I added in ShareFire 1.5 was a handler for being
called as a feed reader from a browser. I'm surprised to hear it work
yet, though, as it was held up by an issue in the AIR SDK. Was that
the way your colleague was starting the app? Interesting...

The upgrade with that feature should be automatically detected from
the previous version of ShareFire, if the user hasn't turned off
automatic update checking.

-Dan

[Oleg]

Hi Dan,

Great work on the new release, thanks very much for the continued
effort.

Being the said colleague I am just chiming in about how I got this to
work:

I loaded up a feed URL in Firefox 3 on WinXP, selected "Choose
application ..." in the dropdown from the Live Bookmarks screen and
found Apprise.exe. I checked "Always use to subscribe to feeds" and
clicked Subscribe Now.

If the application is already running, there seems to be occasionally
a bug with the placement of the notification (it was all the way to
the left and half covered by the edge of the window). I'll let you
know if I see it again.

Otherwise Apprise starts up and correctly presents an add feed dialog
with the URL filled in. When I click OK the feed is added to the list
as usual. The one thing that would be nice is if the window came up to
top.

I take it the AIR shortcoming you referred was detecting Mozilla and
adding Apprise to the list of default readers?

-Oleg