Singularity 0.1 Released!

It's been almost a full month since I started rewriting Singularity, and almost a year and a half since the project was originally announced. This makes Singularity my longest running (regularly updated) project. That's partly why it's such a relief for me to announce the very first public release of the software! All of the project's source code is freely available on Github, under the GNU General Public License.

For those of you who aren't aware of what this is all about, or perhaps have forgotten, here's what this is all about:

Singularity is a simple GTK-based RSS reader. Development was started when Google first announced that Google Reader was being shut down. The project has come a long way since then, with 3 major releases(although this is the first public one), each one featuring a codebase rewrite. The first release, 1.0, was little more than a basic proof of concept. The entire app spanned only two code files, was filled with strange and arcane workarounds to simple problems, and was developed in a very short span of time. Regardless, it did its job(somehow). Afterwards, I felt the need to try and turn Singularity into a halfway decent piece of work. This led to version 1.5, released fairly soon after the 1.0 release. This version was much better than the last, and is the longest-used version so far. However, it wasn't very well designed, had a fairly large number of issues and missing features, and slowly acquired quite a bit of cruft. When I revisited the project this summer, I considered working with the code that I had. However, After spending some time reviewing it I decided it was best to get a fresh start. To that end, I rewrote the whole thing again, and even rolled the version number back to 0.1. That brings us to today. I've used 0.1 for a couple of weeks, even as development continued, and I think I can safely say that it doesn't have any massive issues. There are still bugs, and there's much more to be done, but it's a decent start.

Here's what features are in this version:

• Subscribing to/unsubscribing from feeds, and getting updates.
• Viewing specific feeds, or just reading unread items
• automatic deletion of old items that have been read (This is the only thing that I haven't tested thoroughly. It should work fine, but I'll know in a week or two if it doesn't.)
• Partial RSS, Atom, and RDF support.
• Partial custom themes

The list is pretty short so far, but it's a solid start. The most essential parts are all there, and now it's more about improving quality than just getting the thing to work. At this point, updates will probably be a little infrequent. I've got plenty of other projects in mind, after all. Of course, I'll probably never drop support, since I rely on this app myself. You can rest assured that I'll be keeping this thing in working order for a long time to come.