?First look

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2694

Thank you Robin, for taking the time to give us your feedback. It is really appreciated. Here is some feedback to your feedback :-)

I believe that it shouldn't be too hard to include an option to turn off all 'skinning' in our next release. The belief is that the skins help attract new users to the product, and give them a visually pleasing working environment. However, once users are use to the product, there may be benefits for them if the 'eye candy' is turned off.

There are two camps for what should be displayed for names in the feed list (friendly-name vs file-name). A compromise may be to have an option to not display the path part of the filenames, in the list. We will try to include this option in the next release.

The HTML formatting opens a whole can of worms in the RSS community. Because there is no content type designator for the description field, if there is a bracket '<' in the text, is it part of an HTML tag, or is it simply a bracket in the text? Ultimately, we will support whichever 'guess' is used by most readers, but we need to do a little more research before we determine what is 'normal'. Do you have any more insight into this?

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2694

Sorry, forgot to address your other two posts in my last reply.

The 'forcing the extension to .xml problem' has already been resolved, and will be included in the next release.

All newly created items should be automatically set to the current date/time, and if the feed's 'Auto Pub Date' box is checked, the feed's Pub
Date will automatically be set to the newest item's Pub Date. If either if these aren't working for you, please let us know.

In addition, the next release will also include the full functionality of the 'Smart Date' buttons. By default these buttons will set the date/time to the current date and time. However, on the preferences screen, these buttons can be setup to automatically advance the Pub Dates to the next logical date/time you want. For example, if you always publish on Monday at 9:00 AM, you can set the Smart Date button to automatically advance the Pub Date to that date and time. There are many other options such as: first day of the month, second thursday of the month, tomorrow, etc.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2694

We are tossing around a few options on what the best way to support basic formatting tags would be. Hopefully what we come up with will work well for you.

As for the dates, when we release FeedForAll Beta1 (should be just a couple of days away), please give it a try. You will be able to just click on the 'Smart Date' button next to the Pub Date field, and the default behavior will be exactly what you want.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Tech Support · Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 2694

Robin,

We have just released FeedForAll Beta 1. It addresses much of the suggestions you have posted. Here is what we have done:

Quote:

Call me old-fashioned but the skins look awful: non-intuitive and slow to redraw. Is there an option to have no skin? (and I don't mean BasicBlue that is designed to look like WinXP). You see I'm more of a speed freak than a fancy look freak which is why I have done away with the WinXP eye-candy. At the moment it looks like (forgive me) the skins came first and product functionality after.

Under the 'Preferences' screen you now have an option to 'Disable Skins'. The user interface isn't nearly as pretty as the skinned one, but it is speedy.

Quote:

The ability to have more than one feed open at once (although I do agree with Mark's comments in another thread about "friendly name")

Under the 'Preferences' screen you now have an option to 'Hide paths in feeds list', which will at least only display the filenames. I hope this is more convenient for you.

Quote:

I'd like to see the ability to render HTML tags in the feed (e.g.
, , ) in some kind of preview pane. This of course means the ability to include these formatting items into the feed too - at present I'm coding them by hand (but I'm willing to discuss the pros and cons of including HTML code in the feed).

The feed description now have a WYSIWYG HTML editor. It includes the ability to change font style (bold, italic, underlined, normal), change font color (red, green, blue, black), and add links. Breaks are also automatically handled. It took some doing, so I hope you like it.

Quote:

Also missing an option to automatically enter the current date and time for the item that you are editing.

Newly added items will automatically get the current date and time. For existing items, you can use the 'Smart Date' button to automatically apply the current date and time (it's default behavior).

Quote:

When saving a feed that I opened as a .RSS file, FFA defaulted (without asking me) to a .XML file. It should at least save the file with the same name that it was opened with.

Extensions are now handled the way you would expect.

We love you feedback, please take a look at FeedForAll Beta 1 and let us know what you think.