Friday, April 18, 2003

Installer Offerings Bob at Wise Solutions emailed to remind me that the Wise Installation System has patching built in, and costs less than InstallShield plus vBuild. He also pointed out that Wise for Windows Installer now has a ton of features for server setups: user account creation, IIS administration, and SQL Server administration... basically they implemented my entire wish list from working on the FogBUGZ 3.0 installer. Good work! ... Using patching technology saves a lot of bandwidth, even for the first-time installer, because a lot of the bytes you're distributing may be system files and runtimes that users already have. ... For now, Michael convinced me to stick with the tried-and-true Inno Setup for the next release of CityDesk. The bandwidth savings don't quite justify the effort of switching installers. [Joel on Software]

Item 288, Permalink [] posted 6:18:05 PM   comment []         Google It!      Categories:

SharpReader SharpReader is awesome. Ok, SharpReader is freaking awesome. It supports categories, has multi-threaded updating of feeds, and the entry threading feature is amazing. It tells me when someone else I read refers to the post I'm currently reading. Really fantastic. Even more reason to include entire posts in your RSS feeds. People, you listening?? Hopefully I won't wind up hating SharpReader after using it for a little while like I did with the last RSS reader I tried. One good sign is that pieces of SharpReader have grown on me after using it for a little while. For example, the way it keeps old posts around. It works more like an e-mail client, where you have to explicitly delete old items, rather than having them expire in some way. At first I didn't like this. Syndirella kept a configurable number of old items around (I think it defaulted to 50). NewsDesk only kept items around that were in the current feed. After using it though, I think SharpReader does it the best, because posts simply stay around for as long as you want them to. Seems like the best plan to me, even though you do have to explicitly delete old posts (but there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help you delete a lot of old posts at once ). Ooh, cool. It exports feeds in the OPML file in the same order as they appear in your SharpReader window. Makes sense, right? Now I don't have to sort my OPML file before displaying it. In fact, now I shouldn't!. [Keith's Weblog] Since Keith seems so intent on promoting entire posts in RSS, I hope he doesn't mind me posting his entire post. :-)

Item 287, Permalink [] posted 3:23:08 PM   comment []         Google It!      Categories:  » E-Publishing Explosion «