Good deed for the day
I did a good deed today—I reported a memory leak in Web Kit to Apple. I went through the whole online form thing at bugreport.apple.com.

The thing about bugs is, developers have to know about bugs before they can fix them. Reporting bugs is your civic duty.

(If you’re curious, here’s the source for a simple app that demonstrates it. It’s quite intensely boring.)
05:47 pm #

More on NetNewsWire and Updated Items
It’s starting to look like there are two ways to deal with the issue. They may co-exist—in fact, I’m leaning toward doing both.

1. A pref that allows you to include updated items when going to the previous/next unread item.

In other words, if you hit the space bar, the next item might be an updated item or it might be an unread item.

It’s a simple solution—but if you turn it on it means you’d end up seeing all the little typo fixes updates.

2. An algorithm for determining significant updates. This should be more complex than just a change in length.

Manton Reece suggested among other things that counting the number of links in a description is a good idea—a change in links is probably a significant change, more than just a typo fix. In other words, descriptions aren’t just any old text, they’re text that often contains links, and should be analyzed that way. (They’re also generally made up of sentences and paragraphs, as opposed to C code or something like that.)

What about an HTML diff view?

Aaron Swartz suggested that an HTML diff view would be cool for updated items. And I agree—at least as an option for power users. But the HTML display of updated items is a different issue than whether or not you get to them via the space bar.
05:12 pm #

NetNewsWire and Updated Items
In NetNewsWire 1.0.3, we added an updated items feature. The idea is that NetNewsWire can often tell if an item is updated (edited) rather than new.

Updated items do not get marked as unread. There’s a reason for this: the majority of updates are inconsequential and you don’t want to be annoyed by them. They’re typo fixes, slight re-wordings, that kind of thing.

But sometimes an update is significant, and you don’t want to miss it. There’s no bullet-proof way for NetNewsWire to tell the difference.

I have a few ideas, one or more of which might be good, and I wonder what you think.

Some ideas

1. Try to detect significant updates. There’s no way this could be perfect, but it could be pretty good—NetNewsWire could compare the length of the old description versus the new description. If it differs by n characters (where n is something like 50, or is configurable), then it’s a significant update, and therefore the item is marked as unread.

2. Have a global pref: a “Mark updated items as unread” pref, so people could say they never want to miss any updated item. Also perhaps make it so that this pref can be over-ridden for individual subscriptions.

3. Add a bunch more UI for unread items. For instance, unread counts that now appear as one number would appear as two: the unread count and the updated items count. (As in 22, 7). Add commands for going to the next and previous updated items. Add a new pseudo-feed for just updated items. Etc.

(This option is horrible, because it means an entire parallel to all the unread items UI, but I mention it for completeness, and because I might be wrong about its horribleness.)
01:50 pm #