Singularity Update 8

Changelog

-Items should now be marked as read more reliably. -When you aren't subscribed to any feeds, Singularity now displays a 'Welcome Screen' that prompts you to subscribe to some. -Added a Settings pane to set userthe preferences. -Singularity can now periodically check for feed updates. You can disable this/change the interval from the settings pane. -Fixed a serious bug where feeds could end up with the same id.

Settings

Getting settings into Singularity is probably the #1 culprit for why I haven't made any updates during the past few weeks. This particular feature slowed my progress down considerably, mostly because I needed to do a ton of work to even start seeing progress. At this point the settings pane is mostly empty, and it looks awful, but the hard part is over now.

Down the Road

It's been over a month since 0.1 came out, and you might be curious as to when I'm going to release 0.2. For once, I can answer that! My current goal is to finish singularity 0.2 by New Year's Eve, and release it soon after. Last week, I layed out my goals for 0.2 on Singularity's Github page. The list is pretty long so I'm a little bit worried, but I think I can manage. My goal for 0.2 is to take the base I created with 0.1, fix some issues, and then build off of it with some of its more 'essential' missing features, like the aforementioned settings pane. Currently, it looks like 0.3 will try to make the application act nicer on other systems, as a build up for an eventual attempt at getting it provided as a package in one or two distros. We'll see about that, of course, but I'm hopeful.

Singularity Update 7

Changelog

-Added an experimental feature to make feed items fit together nicely. However, it probably won't make it into the release. -Fixed a bug where you couldn't add feeds anymore. -Made a change to the install so that it doesn't require extra work. -Moved the location of the default css and status emblems to /local/share. The default.css file in ~/.local/share/singularity will override it, letting you customize your view a bit.

A Fitting Change

This week, I tried to change the way that items are arranged. Using the css 'flexbox' feature, you can make things fit together in different ways depending on how much room they take up. The result is ok, but pretty underwhelming. Flexbox won't resize content to make it pack more efficiently, so anything containing text will take up a full row. I'll probably need to mess with this a bit more before I include it. The other issue is that the items that get packed into rows aren't all marked as read correctly. This is probably for the same reason that this issue occurs when the view scrolls too rapidly. This issue is starting to become a bit more serious, so fixing it is probably the next thing I'll get to.

The Clearing

Just the other day, old items were cleared for the first time. This was a day I feared slightly, since I wasn't sure how things would go. Considering that, I'm happy to announce that the results of that were mixed, but promising. It looks like any feed that had updated during the one-month period was correctly cleared, and nothing more occurred. Any feed that hadn't was also cleared, but then every item in it was reloaded. This is precisely what I was afraid of, but it looks like the issue might only happen on my end. I added the feeds when the feature was still a bit glitchy, so I think that's what caused the issue. Unfortunately, it's hard to say until next month comes around, and things get cleared again. If the feeds fail twice, I'll have to start testing and fixing things more aggressively. Anyway, this event reminded me that I still need to add a 'clear all' button. Hopefully I'll be getting that in before 0.2.