Bloglines Toolkit 0.9.0

Today I am releasing a new version of the Bloglines Toolkit for Mozilla. This version was created after receiving some great input from those who downloaded the initial release.

Because I still consider the extension ‘not quite done’, I’m only moving the version number to 0.9.0.

There are a couple of loose ends remaining that I’d like to check out and tie up prior to releasing a 1.0.0 version, but that should be in the very near future. In the meantime, this release should be stable and quite usable.

In the meantime, here are the features that were addressed in this release, for those who are just itching to know what was changed from the first go-round:

• Fixed some issues with the Javascript
• Added pause feature to the Notifier
• Increased the minimums for the Notifier
• Updated the extension for OS X

I found some problems in the Javascript for the user preferences. I think that this only affected the opening of tabs in the background. Mainly, I don’t think you could choose that option. I also updated the Javascript and the XUL to be more compatible with OS X. Hopefully a ctrl-click on the icon should work to bring up the preferences (this will work on other platforms, too) and I added a bit of spacing around the icon so that it would display without being obscured.

I added a feature that will pause the notification function when you click on the icon. This feature is an option. If you leave it turned off, it will act just like it has so far – nothing will happen when you click the icon (well, your blogs will display). But if you turn this feature on, it will clear the ‘unread’ notification from the icon and will not check for new messages again until some period of time has elapsed. You are also able to override this default delay if you would like. Thanks to Shrike (and others) for the idea.

Speaking of time – I also bumped up the default refresh time from 60 seconds to 180 seconds. Sorry if this is not frequent enough for you, but in order to help keep the load on Bloglines from becoming overwhelming, and to keep each of us from watching the clock too badly, it seemed that this was a good idea. You can of course change the default, but 180 seconds (3 minutes) is the minimum that the extension will allow for both the refresh and the pause. Thanks to several people for this suggestion, too.