Developer notes - LS Newsreader 0.3

31 Jan, 2005

This program uses some server-side PHP scripts to retrieve
the content provider's RSS feeds and illustrate the text with
some photos fetched from the full stories' pages.
No disk caching is done due to copyright issues. This is a BIG
performance drawback.
While much of the work is done on server side, there were
a few things to be solved on the client side as well. One of
them was a HTML-entity parser/converter to find and replace
some characters like the dollar sign ($).

To Do List:

• Support additional content providers.
• Make cooperation deals with as many providers as possible
  to retrieve/use data in more effective ways. This would improve
  performance significantly.
• Ability for the user to retrieve the headlines only,
  before / instead of downloading a full category at once.
• Ability to launch the web browser with the full story of the
  current headline if the user wishes to do so. (Note: a link
  to each story's URL is already retrieved/stored in the app.)
• In non-picture mode only text data should be retreived from
  the server, thus improving performance.
• User should be given the chance to set a maximum number of
  headlines to download per channel.
• If two headlines are completely the same (typical Yahoo! News
  RSS error), only one of them should be downloaded and shown.
• Improved error handling.
• Being more informative during data download.
• Turn lights on when data download completes.
• Local data caching when it becomes available.
• Fancy graphics and animations if requested.
• Revision based on user feedback.

Marcell Lelkes
Company: Lunasoft (http://www.lunasoft.hu)
E-mail: lelkes@lunasoft.hu