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