Membranophonist's Ramblings

Displaying feed meta-data in NetNewsWire

In both traditional and widescreen views, the content pane of NetNewsWire currently goes to waste unless a headline is selected. Using it to display feed information useful to users would provide additional functionality without consuming any additional screen real estate.

The GNOME feed reader Liferea uses a layout similar to NNW's default three-pane interface, with the subscriptions listed on the left, the headlines in the top right section, and the content in the bottom right. Rather than leaving the bottom-right pane empty unless a headline is selected, here is what appears in Liferea when Slashdot's subscription is selected without selecting a headline:

Particularly Useful Functions

• Single-click access to the homepage
• Direct site query input

This is of great potential use with any site which provides a searching facility.

• E-mail contact for the manager of the feed

For reasons beyond my comprehension, the e-mail links in Liferea are not clickable. Making them so would allow for easy reporting of feed bugs (assuming you can get this far with the feed!).

• Category

This is part of the RSS 2.0 spec, but I don't see it in the Atom 0.3 specification draft. It could eventually be used as one criterion for building smart subscription groups.

This would fit well into NetNewsWire's default traditional view interface. With proper formatting, it could also work in widescreen view, but I can't think of a way in which it would work with the combined view.

What should be displayed if a folder or multiple subscriptions are selected? If there is only one feed within the group that has unread headlines, it would probably be safe to display that particular feed's info. A simple "This group has several updated feeds" or "Multiple subscriptions are selected" notification message could be displayed when applicable.

Posted by Membranophonist at March 6, 2004 07:07 PM | TrackBack