Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I feel like I’m keynoting my very own MacWorld Expo today, what with being able to announce updates across the entire Sci-Fi Hi-Fi product line. In addition to a rather routine PodWorks update, I’m pleased to announce the first new release of Cocoalicious since I went on my summer hiatus, and, if I do say so myself, possibly the best release evar. As Steve would say, we think you’re really going to like it.

Here’s what’s new:

Favicons: Cocoalicious now displays favicons for each site in the main post list, in much the same way Safari does. Icons are automatically downloaded for new posts, and are refreshed every time the bookmark is viewed in the built-in browser. Thanks to Eric Blair for his work on this, as well as Ken Ferry for his help.

Automator: Cocoalicious AppleScript czar Armin Briegel has implemented some minimal Automator support for Cocoalicious. Examples of things you can do include finding every post within a certain date range tagged with “toread” and sending the URLs to Safari to open. My experience working with these actions so far has been a bit troublesome (I suspect due more to Automator wonkiness that anything else, but I’m not sure yet), so definitely treat them as beta.

(Slightly) Improved AppleScript: There is now an AppleScript property to get the current selected post (I implemented this to improve the Automator support).

“delicious:” URL scheme: I think this last minute contribution by Gus Mueller may steal the show for this release. What Gus has done is make Cocoalicious register to handle URLs beginning with “delicious:”, and automatically come forward with a pre-populated posting sheet when the system sends it one. So a URL like
“delicious:url=http://www.scifihifi.com&description=Sci-Fi%20Hi-Fi,” when clicked in a web page link, will cause Cocoalicious to bring up its posting sheet pre-populated with “http://www.scifihifi.com” for the URL and “Sci-Fi Hi-Fi” for the description.

What makes this extra cool is that it makes a “Send to Cocoalicious” bookmarklet possible. Just drag that link to the bookmark bar in a browser that supports bookmarklets (Safari, Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb releases greater than 4.5), and you instantly have a convenient button to send the current page to Cocoalicious.

Improved authentication: We all owe Mike Smochko a lot of thanks, because he’s been helping take care of some of the less glamorous coding chores in Cocoalicious–things like making sure errors get displayed for things that go wrong (something Cocoalicious is currently very lax about). For this release, Mike improved the login dialog to make it show an error (rather than simply fail silently) for incorrect logins. As a result of this work and some related improvements to Cocoalicious’ keychain support, I believe using multiple accounts with Cocoalicious should also be bit easier.

Case insensitive tags: The tag “Mac” is now treated exactly the same as the tag “mac.” I believe this is more in line with the way del.icio.us does things.

And, of course, who can forget assorted bug fixes!

All in all, I think this update does exactly what any good Apple software release should: it fixes a load of long-standing complaints, while providing some eye candy for the box. Thanks again to all the contributors who made it possible!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 17th, 2005 at 8:26 am and is filed under Mac, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.