mini rss reader
Im trying to figure out a way to create a mac app that will pop up a new story evertime a blog publishes a new story.
Its like an rss feed but i dont need it to keep track of them until i have read them. Really i just want it to pop up with the title of the new story.
Can anyone help point me to some good tutorials or documents?
Thanks
You'll have to do several of things:
1) You have to poll the rss feed (read it from time to time)
2) You have to pull down the code from the feed
- see http://www.cocoaforum.com/2009/12/12/accessing-a-website-page-source/#post1
3) You'll have to parse it (by reading it into a xml reader)
4) Get the data in which you're interested
5) If you haven't told the user about this before, display the result
6) Store the data (so you don't nag him every time you go to the server)
Something else to think about is that you'll have to provide some kind of UI for the user to be able to configure your application with the URLs of the feeds (and possibly polling frequency)
However you can probably write this as a perl or python or bash script to get some idea what it feels like before you spend a lot of time building it.
If you use bash, you'll probably find the CocoaDialog useful for showing popups, sqlite3 to create and maintain a database of 'old' messages. You might even get lucky and find grep is sufficient to extract the stuff you want from the RSS/XML stuff.
So you might be able to get something working in an hour or two just for fun. After that you'll probably loose interest in this. However you never know, this could be the next great FaceBook Watcher or something - call it Facelook.
