Release: NewsFox 0.8.1

[R Pruitt]

Newsfox 0.8.1 is prereleased at mozdev. This is basically the version that will be released later at addons.mozilla.org, but with fewer translations. There may be minor bug fixes before the release.

• New feed parser: smaller, faster, and (bug#14444, bug#15632, bug#17671, bug#17681, bug#17768)
• UTF-8 encoding of files (bug#17446)
• User chosen NewsFox directory location
• Date style options in global dialog, thanks Bernhard
• Partial solution for external DTDs, see (bug#14929)
• Atom xhtml displayed as xhtml in text view
• Updated help (bug#17699)
• Email article links (bug#15412)
• Enclosure support
• Minor fixes
  • Textview.css improvements
  • Expanded OPML import options
  • Autosubscribe and autorefresh conflict (bug#17530)
  • Tested with FF3.0a7
  • Updated icons, thanks ADR (bug#17387)
  • 'Add feed' has better selection after operation
  • Article pane doesn't reload on refresh (bug#17798)

NewsFox no longer uses the Sage feed parser, but rather uses its own.

The UTF-8 file encoding is not backward compatible with previous NewsFox versions. This version will read prior versions, but you will not be able to use a newsfox folder saved with NewsFox 0.8.1 with previous versions of NewsFox.

You can now choose the location of the newsfox directory. For example, you can choose a location on a flash drive and take your newsfox directory with you.

There are now 3 date styles available for use in the article pane: ISO with no seconds, the short date as set on your system, and the long date as set on your system.

There are two new advanced user features: email articles and enclosures(podcasts). These are advanced user features because how the links are handled is determined by your system setup, and this is beyond the control of NewsFox. The chance of problems with these features being a problem with NewsFox is not high. :)

There is now the ability to email articles (title, link, body) using a mailto: link in text view. Mailto: links are limited to 256(?) bytes, so there is an about:config option to copy the body of the article to the clipboard.

The control of text view via the textview.css file has been improved. The following classes are defined: .newsfox-mail, .newsfox-title, .newsfox-category, .newsfox-date, .newsfox-link, .newsfox-enclosures, .newsfox-encl. So you can style individual pieces of the newsfox-box in text view. For example, to keep the categories from showing, place

.newsfox-category { display: none; }

in your textview.css file inside your newsfox folder. The class .newsfox-enclosures refers to the span containing all enclosures, and .newsfox-encl refers to a single enclosure.