Major release: NewsFox 0.8

[R Pruitt]

Newsfox 0.8 is released. See articles 'NewsFox releases' and 'Latest versions' in this feed for more information.

• Search folders (bug#14129, bug#14132, bug#15422, bug#15939, bug#17139)
• User defined keyboard shortcuts, see help menu, default is none (bug#14719)
• On new installation, Newsfox RSS feed automatically loaded
• Articles in group exportable to RSS 2.0 local file, see main toolbar options
• More strings localized, thanks teo and babelzilla
• bg-BG Bulgarian locale (Fingli, Babelzilla.org)
• zh-TW Chinese traditional locale (jackbin, Babelzilla.org)
• Minor fixes
  • New automatic article deletion method (bug#17331)
  • Program options dialog only allowed changing one option at a time, caused by interaction with preference observer
  • Relative hrefs handled in atom feeds
  • 'Delete feed' and 'delete group' have better selection after operation
  • 'Cancel refresh' button responds within one second
  • Faster unicode character encoding (bug#17446)
  • Horizontal 3 pane option, newsfox.global.horizontalPanes (bug#15517)
  • XUL dialog improvements, thanks teo

Search is implemented with search folders. You can search on flagged status, unread status, date of article, and text in article within a specified group of feeds. New feeds are included in existing search groups by default.

The 'search text' box is a Google-type search box: ' ' means AND, '|' or 'OR' or 'or' mean OR, '-' means NOT, and items in single or double quotes are kept intact. Examples:

• newsfox rss
  will search for articles containing both 'newsfox' and 'rss'
• 'x|y' | html
  will search for articles containing either 'x|y' or 'html'
• (abc xyz) | -"--"
  will search for articles containing both 'abc' and 'xyz' or not containing '--'

The search results are highlighted in bold red within the article. The styling can be changed in the 'textview.css' file, see "http://newsfox.mozdev.org/rss/2007.html#nf5". Technical notes: The entire article text is searched, so for example search terms inside hrefs will be found but not highlighted. If you don't want highlighting, you need to have '.srch' in your 'textview.css' file or it will get added again; for instance have ".srch {}".

There are two built-in options for keyboard shortcuts available on the options menu. 'Standard' uses single keys and won't work well with find as you type, and 'alternate' uses alt- keystrokes that are not used by basic K-Meleon or Firefox. Users can define their own shortcut keys by editing the file 'accel.xml' in the newsfox folder. See, for example, http://xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/keyshort.html for allowable modifiers and keys.

Articles in groups can be exported to a local file in RSS 2.0 format. This can be used either for saving articles (for example from a folder of all flagged articles) or sharing with others. To share you only need to upload the file to a location accessible by others (an http site typically), and it will function as an RSS feed.

Only articles currently present in the feed persist when 'Automatically delete old entries' is selected in feed options.

'Delete feed' and 'delete group' now select an adjacent feed or group after operation to allow quick deletion with keyboard shortcuts.

Set newsfox.global.horizontalPanes equal to true in about:config to enable the horizontal 3 pane option.