The little story behind LuckNews is that... I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mountain Lion (10.8) a few months ago and found that the blogs that I had been reading through the Mail program were no longer working. Apple had dropped support for RSS feeds from Mail and Safari in Mountain Lion. I went to the App Store to look for an app to read the blogs and bought one and tried it out. I didn't like it, so bought a second. I didn't like that one, so I bought a third. I didn't like that one either. I didn't try them all and there may be an amazing RSS/Atom/News reader on the App Store that would have done exactly what I wanted...but hey, I'm a software developer with time on my hands so I decided to write my own.
I'm a retired software developer. I worked professionally at Alias (which became Alias|Wavefront, then Alias Systems, then Autodesk) for 20 years. Those were 20 good years but by the end I wanted a change and I had discovered sailing. I had bought a sailboat a few years earlier and decided to go cruising - sailing around, here and there, exploring. That story is described in my other blog. As I'm currently back in Seattle after having been out cruising for a year, waiting for the summer to arrive so I can take off south again on my next journey I have some time to work on fun projects.
I hadn't programmed since I retired from Alias/Autodesk before leaving on my first cruise. I had forgotten how much fun programming can be, and I've had a lot of fun creating LuckNews.
Version 1.0 is ready for consumption. I have a list of things I plan to add over the next little while, but this version provides all the functionality needed in a simple RSS/Atom/News reader I think. The things I hope to add will be bonus features, not strictly necessary. I welcome suggestions and comments on the app of course.
The app only works on Mac's and only on those mac's running version 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or higher. (There is nothing higher as I write this, but at some point there will be...) Its cheap! Its simple.
As an added bonus, if you recently upgraded to Mountain Lion and had been reading RSS news feeds in Mail and are annoyed that you can no longer do that, you may be wondering what happened to all those news subscriptions? As long as you didn't do a clean install of the OS, they are still around and LuckNews can get them back for you. Use the 'Import Subscriptions..." menu entry and follow what I hope is an easy set of steps to get them back.
If you haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion yet, and have been reading RSS news feeds in Mail, and plan to upgrade to Mountain Lion - then in order for LuckNews to retrieve your old RSS subscriptions you need to do an upgrade, not a clean install in order to easily get them back again.
I hope you enjoy!
Craig.
No comments:
Post a Comment