Saturday, November 26, 2011

Siilihai 1.0.2 released

Simple is beautiful. The progress dialog has been removed from client as it is generally not needed. Also there are a lot of code cleanups in client.

A lot of client logic has been moved to the libsiilihai. This makes it easy to write client applications with less code. It paves way for the mobile version which has been planned for long time.

Edit: This build is for Linux & Mac only. Windows build system broke down and will be fixed soon(tm).

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Siilihai 1.0.1 released

Most visible fixes in 1.0.1 are:
- Account Settings dialog now closes properly
- No unnecessary syncing - startup & shutdown is faster
- Fixed a crash which may occur when unsubscribing group using a debug build

The release should be in PPA soon and Windows build is available for download.
Mac version is still 1.0.0.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Mac version available

Ilkka Laukkanen has built Siilihai 1.0.0 for Mac. It should work on OSX 10.5 and later. This version has not been thoroughly tested but should work.

Unzip the package and double click to start Siilihai.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

1.0 Released

Many older Internet users still prefer Usenet News to the currently dominant web forums. Newsgroups were quick to read using specialized graphical or text-based client applications. Siilihai is an Open Source web forum reader which brings the user experience of news readers to web forums. Due to lack of standard protocols, using forums in dedicated client requires a minimal parser to be written. Siilihai has a graphical editor for writing them quickly. Siilihai 1.0 has been released after long beta testing, and it is written using the Nokia Qt framework with portability in mind. It also has some features not found even in advanced news readers, such as synchronizing state between multiple computers.

Finally it's time for 1.0. Siilihai contains all the planned features and seems to be stable. It's not ready yet (and never will be) but suitable for daily use . Personally I'm reading 10 forums with it which would not be possible using a browser.

Known bugs
- Unchanged groups seem to be synced sometimes. This makes launching & quitting Siilihai slower than it should be.
- Number of messages to download (per thread) is not always synchronized correctly between readers.
- Color coding in Parser Maker sometimes gets confused. Clicking on "Download" fixes it.
- User account dialog does not close.

Planned improvements

- Handle HTTP 302 Redirects. Lack of this causes at least Korg Forums to fail.
- Support for changing password (also a forgotten one).
- E-mail notifications for parser authors if parser stops working.

Long term plans (Siilihai 2.0)
- TapaTalk support (is a protocol for web forum data access)
- OpenCollaboration support (another protocol for the same)
- Posting and replying
- Possibly RSS/Atom and other non-forum stuff as plugins

Thursday, September 29, 2011

0.10.4 - aka 1.0rc1 released

Siilihai 0.10.4 contains only small bugfixes here and there. If it works well, it'll be 1.0 next week. Last few releases have been working fine so regressions are not expected.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

0.10.2 released

Again a bug-fixing release. The client seems to work pretty well now. I've noticed some oddities in unread message counters but that'll be fixed in next release. Please report any issues you find.

Monday, September 12, 2011

0.10.1 released

..which fixes several bugs introduced in 0.10.0.

Friday, September 9, 2011

0.10.0 released

Siilihai 0.10.0 has been released. Main features:

- Got rid of SQLITE dependency as switched to simpler XML database. Starting and quitting is now much faster.
- Authentication dialogs work now much smarter when there are several forums needing authentication (for example when syncing for first time).
- Forums download their parsers ASAP, meaning shorter start time. I've got more speedups in mind but currently startup seems to be quite fast.
- Many clean-ups and bug fixes not visible to the user.

0.10.0 is still beta quality - there will be bugs and they will be fixed. Report any you found to e-mail address found below.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Next release coming soon

I'm working on the next major release, 0.10.0. I have got rid of the SQLITE database and replaced it with XML files. This is much simpler and faster. Also there will be a lot of architecture changes which are not visible for user.

I had to delete last release from Launchpad, as the source package contained some extra build files not needed. Unfortunately Launchpad also deleted the binaries so currently the PPA is not working. I'll upload 0.10.0 as soon as it is stable enough. If you really, really need last 0.9.24, let me know and I'll see if i can upload it.

More info on 0.10.0 as soon as I finish it.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

0.9.24 Released

This version contains some architecture changes making Siilihai more stable and probably a little bit faster.

- Forums with update errors are now shown with red icon.
- A lot of bug fixes in updating, syncing and UI logic.
- Graphics are now included in the binary, no need for external image files.

There has also been some minor tuning on server side.

On the downside I've noticed that the sqlite database storage is slow especially when quitting Siilihai. In next release it will probably be replaced with plain XML file.

Ubuntu's Launchpad has been busy for last 24 hours so the update is not yet available. Windows version can be downloaded from the download page.

Friday, June 17, 2011

New release coming soon

I've been working on the next release, 0.9.24 which will contain a lot of new fixes and improvements. Stay tuned.

Ps. I deleted old forum "MuroBBS" and fixed the working "MuroBBS (toimiva)". I renamed it to just MuroBBS. Looks like
server changed me to be the owner of the forum so i couldn't notify the original author about the change.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

0.9.21 released

Long time no news. There have been some minor update releases for Ubuntu lately as I've been fixing any remaining bugs. 0.9.21 is the first release which is built in release mode - i.e. without debug symbols and with compiler optimization.

Siilihai should now be faster (by compiler optimizations) and the windows installer shrank from 100 megs to 14 megs.

This will probably be the last release for Ubuntu Maverick as I'm upgrading to Natty soon.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

0.9.17 released

Just minor bugfixes. 0.9.16 has been working really well. If I'm happy with this, it'll be 1.0 time really soon!

Friday, February 11, 2011

0.9.16 Released

Siilihai 0.9.16 has been released. This one brings huge boost in speed during startup and shutdown. Also some bugs related to syncing have been fixed.

The Ubuntu package is now for Maverick. Older Ubuntu versions won't be supported.

Have fun!