Mulle kybernetiK presents
MulleNewz icon

MulleNewz.dock
MulleNewz is a dockling which allows you to stay in touch with the world via the OSX dock! It is an easy to configure RSS reader which means that it can access a lot of popular sites that offer RSS content - at once! Just click on the headline you're interested in and MulleNewz will open your preferred browser and direct it to the URL containing the whole story. Easy!

MulleNewz screenshot

Newz

Tue, May 30, 2003
Uploaded Version 1.9. Due to a bugfix in the EDMLParser a new version had to be created. O'Reilly RSS feeds are rendered properly now.
NOTE: As always when installing the latest version, proceed following these steps!

Tue, May 20, 2003
Uploaded Version 1.8. This new version features an improved XML parser, so we can render more sites properly. This is especially true for my new favourite PerversionTracker.

Wed, Mar 5, 2003
Version 1.7 is ready for download. This new version features nearly all feature requests of Uko Fiedler. Basically all remaining issues with the new Preferences panel & dockling interaction have been found and eliminated. Please note that in the source release of 1.7 the Application-version of MulleNewz feature-wise lags behind the dockling version. I'll probably address these issues in the 1.8 release.

Tue, Mar 4, 2003
Attention please! Once again people had problems downloading - but this time we could identify the reasons for these problems due to excellent bug reports. It seems that people use 'tar' to extract our archives (and StuffIt seems to do the same), whereas our archives have been created with 'gnutar' - which ships with the Apple Developer Tools. In order to extract the source archives you have to use 'gnutar' because of long file names. For the casual users I've changed my release scripts to use DMG format instead of gnutar archives for distribution. Also, starting with the 1.6 release, the archive suffixes have been changed to better reflect the archives' contents.

Thanks must go to eichin@thok.org and Uko Fiedler for helping analyzing the problem.

Mon, Mar 3, 2003
Released version 1.6 - which marks a big step forward. The dockling features a working & full-fledged preferences panel. This seemingly impossible endeavor is made possible by "outsourcing" the preferences as a separate application now, hidden well in the wrapper of the dockling. This application communicates with the dockling via the user defaults and distributed notifications. The result is a dockling which feels just right, with reordereable sources via drag and drop (in the preferences) ... 'nuff said, check it out for yourself.

Fri, Feb 14, 2003
Attention please! At least two people reported problems unstuffing the Mac OS X binary archive with StuffIt 7.0. StuffIt might have been a useful application on Mac OS 9, but it hasn't got along well with the Mac OS X transition in my experience. If you prefer a much better and bug-free user experience I'd like to point you to the excellent OpenUp application of OPENSTEP fame! :-)
If you still want to go with StuffIt please urge its creators to fix the problems in an upcoming release (I won't do it, I don't use it).

Wed, Feb 12, 2003
Version 1.5 is out. This release is mainly intended for the Jaguar users - though under the hood several things improved slightly. The current version can also build as a real OS X Application, though I wouldn't recommend it. Despite its technical shortcomings, a Dockling is still better suited for this kind of application. Also, this version will build on GNUstep. Real die-hards might find this a welcome challenge! :-)

Mon, Jun 10, 2002
Version 1.4 is out. This release features several improvements when dealing with broken rdf:RDF content. It will also suppress rendering HTML tags like <i> that MulleNewz cannot display, making the overall result highly readable.

Fri, Aug 10, 2001
Version 1.3 is out. This release features minor architectural changes to support threaded fetching in an upcoming release (in fact, it's all in there but Threads don't seem to work within docklings as of now). Also, fetches are represented via visual feedback inside the icon!

Wed, Aug 01, 2001
UPDATE: Some people just discovered some bugs in the 1.1 packaging as well. I was able to reproduce the problems and tested the 1.2 packaging on two different machines before releasing it. Please forget the 1.1 version and upgrade to 1.2 if you experienced malfunctions.
A new version has been put up which sports a self-contained binary version of the dockling. You no longer need to install the ED* frameworks in order for MulleNewz.dock to run. If you want to build the dockling from source, however, you'll have to download them and install them correctly as can be read in the BUILD.rtf document which can be found inside the MulleNewz project.

Installation
Once you've opened the archive, copy the MulleNewz.dock dockling into your /Applications folder (or anywhere you like, I usually put it into /Applications/Dock Extras). Then simply double-click its icon or drag it into the dock. That's it.

Updating from previous releases
Simply replacing stuff doesn't work. You also need to kill the SystemUIServer and the Dock, in this order:
  1. Put the new dockling in place, that is, put it where you put the dockling before
  2. kill the SystemUIServer: kill `ps axww| grep SystemUIServer | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
  3. kill the Dock: kill `ps axww| grep Dock.app | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
Everything will automatically restart afterwards and MulleNewz should run fine then.

Download
What
Size
via HTTP
via FTP
MulleNewz 1.9 Mac OS X Binary
151 kb
MulleNewz 1.9 Source
195 kb
MulleNewz 1.4 Mac OS X Binary (pre-Jaguar)
96 kb
MulleNewz 1.4 Source (pre-Jaguar)
156 kb

The sourcecode to MulleNewz is also available via CVS. Check our cvs pages to find out more about it in detail.

Also, in order to compile the source code, you need to get the latest source code of the EDCommon framework. Please do also make sure to read the file named BUILD.rtf which can be found inside the MulleNewz project.

How it works
MulleNewz is written in Objective-C. It uses the dockling library written by Brian Webster and also links against Erik Dörnenburg's EDCommon framework. MulleNewz uses the EDMLParser defined in the EDCommon framework to parse RSS data. MulleNewz supports RSS version 0.91 and above, including RDF (RSS version 1.0). You don't need to specify the content at all as MulleNewz automatically detects the remote side's format. Unknown tags are currently being ignored, so it should also work with future extensions to the RSS format (unless they radically redefine the format which is unlikely to happen).

MulleNewz can connect to all URL schemes which are currently supported by the NSURL class, namely http, ftp and file. MulleNewz has been tested with http and file schemes only.

What's next?
I'm currently investigating a GNUstep port of MulleNewz. In fact, it already builds and runs on GNUstep. It's not well tested though, so you'll probably experience problems.

I have also done a .NET port of MulleNewz recently. It works with most sites but still has some problems, especially the preferences panel (miniaturizing panels leads to very strange results on Windows). The .NET version is implemented in C# and has been developed using Microsoft's Developer Studio. Because it uses the icon tray on Windows it won't probably work with MONO.

What's NOT next?
I will not incorporate other formats besides RSS or RDF. I also won't port MulleNewz to Mac OS X Server 1.2 (Rhapsody) as I don't use that platform anymore.

Credits
MulleNewz was written by Marcus Müller. It took roughly a day to get to version 1.0, including the artwork (that's why it's so lousy), thanks to Erik's excellent (bugfixed ;-) frameworks. MulleNewz was inspired by Slashdock, a dockling written by Stas Pietrucha.