godenzim/readernotifier

Reader Notifier aims to supplement the official Mac Notifier menubar plugins for OS X, in adding support for Google Reader. Reader Notifier tells you when you have new unread rss/feed items available, and lets you visit those feeds without ever going to the Google Reader interface.

Contact and About

Reader Notifier has originally been made by Troels Bay, forked by canbuffi and now actively developed by Mike Godenzi and Claudio Marforio, independent developers living in Europe. Please donate if you enjoy and find the app useful.

Some background

This is a fork of canbuffi’s Reader Notifier on github (Canbuffi on github) to push active development on the project. Like the original it is released under GPL.

Here are the original FAQs from Troels Bay’s site:

Reader Notifier

Reader Notifier aims to supplement the official Mac Notifier menubar plugins for OS X, in adding support for Google Reader. Reader Notifier tells you when you have new unread rss/feed items available, and lets you visit those feeds without ever going to the Google Reader interface.

Disclaimer and other information

This software is open source under the GPL license. It basically means that you can do whatever you like with the source code, but you have to keep it open source, and released under GPL if you redistribute it.
If this piece of software somehow breaks your computer, I cannot be held responsible. However, it is highly doubtful that it could ever do any harm apart from crashing itself in a worst case scenario.

Troubleshooting

One user has noted that upon new releases, he sometimes had to erase the preference file to avoid crashes. I still haven’t located this bug, but please report back if you have the same issue. Preference file is located at ~/Library/Preferences/com.bay.ReaderNotifier.plist

Q&A

Reader Notifier is provided as is. It should be fairly easy to understand the application and as such it does not need a help file. However, this section is for things perhaps not so obvious for the ordinary user:

• I want to be able to choose more than one label to look for! Well yes, while that is a mighty fine idea, Reader Notifier is made with the philosophy of as little post-processing as possible (to keep your computer clean of unnecessary CPU-cycles). So as long as Google does not have the option of viewing several labels at a single time in the Google Reader interface, it will not be a feature of Reader Notifier either. However, as a workaround, you can just make a new label and add it to all the feeds you want Reader Notifier to check. It is indeed possible for one single feed to have multiple labels.
• I want Reader Notifier to startup automatically! Okay then, you should go to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items, and then drag the Application icon into the list.
• I want to disable growl notifictions! Go to System Preferences → Growl, and uncheck the box at Reader Notifier. Expect never to be bothered again.
• I want – insert something here – to be implemented! Well that’s probably a nice idea, but I won’t know until you let me know! Why not use the comment function below?.

Please help if you can

If you are of a creative nature, and want to make new menubar icons (or enhance the existing once) please send me suggestions! Especially the BW image displayed when no unread items exists is a bit rough.

readernotifier's Issues

Mark all as Read doesn't show

Whenever my unread count gets over a certain amount, 'mark all as read' is replaced by 'more unread items exit' This is problematic because then I have to open all of the items to be able to mark them as read.

Unable to run on Snow Leopard 10.6.4

I only get the exclamation icon. Tried clearing cache file and removing plist. Verified the credentials are correct.

Unread count when more than 1000 items are unread

Years ago, when Reader Notifier was first under development, I exchanged emails with the author showing him a Firefox extension that obtained an accurate count of unread items above 1000. He adopted this code and it worked great for years. Recently, the old versions stopped working, and Google led me here. Thank you for helping to modernize this app.

I note that it cannot count above 1000 unread items anymore. Is this a Google-imposed limitation, or would this perhaps be something that could be fixed, by any chance?

Either way, my thanks for keeping this alive.

Feature request: Shortcut for "Check now"

Hi,

if possible I would like a keyboard shortcut for Check now. My workflow is that when I see news, I open google reader and read the news. Afterwards I click the "Check now" option in readernotifier. This would be nice if this could be handle using a keyboard shortcut.

Thanks

Martin

Specifying a label should affect menubar unread count

The title really says it all. When only displaying items with a particular label, the unread count in the menubar should be the unread count for just that label.

Clicking RSS label in Safari does nothing

Reader Notifier used to plug in to Safari in such a way that if you click the RSS icon next to the URL it would open Google Reader in a new tab with the option to add the new feed. When you click it now, Safari loses focus and does nothing.

Doesn't remember password in Mac OS X 10.6.4

Version 2.2.3 doesn't remember my account password in Mac OS X 10.6.4.

Every time I launch it, it complains about not being able to connect to Google. When I check my account settings, the password field is blank. Filling in my password and clicking Use works fine.

Thanks,
Carlos

Unnecessary Network Activity (v2.2.3)

I've noticed unnecessary network activity with l.google.com, although feed update interval of 30 minutes and auto update has been disabled.

Issue when waking machine from sleep

Hi, I've noticed an issue that is still prevalent in 2.2.3 where if I put my laptop to sleep, then wake it up, I get a prompt from Reader Notifier about unable to connect to google and the exclamation icon displays on reader notifier. It does this each time I wake the machine from sleep. Just wondering if there was a way to suppress this warning if the machine is waking or perhaps suppress all warnings (only show a warning if creds don't work, don't tell me that you can't connect to google). Also, the exclamation icon stays that way even if connectivity is restored (wireless finishes coming up), but does go away if there are new items.

Thanks again for your work on this! I'm so glad that someone resurrected it!

Brian

Error 404 - stopped working, something on google's side might have changed

Hello,

lately on trying to open a feed in google.com/reader through the app, I get responses like:

1. That's an error.
   The requested URL /reader/preview/*/feed/http://images.apple.com/downloads/macosx/home/recent.rss was not found on this server. That's all we know.

Is there a fix ?