[if you click on it you actually see something!]

Ok. Last time I checked the iTunes store, in Switzerland (where I currently live, and a friend of mine has a Swiss iTunes Store account) the most expensive songs (the “hits”?) were rated at 2.- chf – In Italy (where I have my iTunes Store account) most expensive songs were rated at 1.29 euro.

Now, the Swiss Store has always been more expensive (1.29 euro ~= 1.70 chf) – but now!? Are you joking!? 2.20 chf, as shown in the pictures, it’s 1.66 euro, or, for the US guys it’s 2.03 usd!!!

I find this price increase outrageous. We (everyone that’s not living in the US) have always been paying more for our songs (0.99 euro [1.21 usd] and 1.50 chf [1.39 usd]). But now it’s even worse.

It just doesn’t make sense, anymore, so what? I just feel robbed. And robbed. Over again. 10% price increase What’s next?

Bye bye.

~C

Mike and me have been looking around for a solution to this and stumbled across Reader Notifier. It’s a small MacOSX application that resides in the Menu bar and notifies you when new items are available.

Since the code was publicly available we decided to have a look at it… Well, after coding for a while for iPhone and Mac applications we could tell immediately that we could have improved the code and possibly the application functionalities. Now Reader Notifier Reloaded is born. We keep the code open, so that everyone can just fork it, modify it, have a look at it, …

Currently Reader Notifier Reloaded lets you:

• Be notified through Growl about new unread items
• Mark all your feeds as read
• Read the feed directly through the menu application
• Star an item
• Automatic updates

And all of this with a much more structured code than the original and without any memory leaks (well, there were many and we managed to remove them all, hopefully).

A stable version is downloadable from github

If you have feature requests, find bugs or just want to get involved with the project, drop us a note either here or on github.

-Mike and Claudio

Since Sparkle is using public/private key cryptography in order to sign the updates and guarantee their authenticity there is some “fiddling” one has to do in order to push out an update. Marc Liyanage provides us with a great way to do all the signing, packaging and xml generation for updates.

I’ve been using his technique and just adapted the shell script to make it work on my Snow Leopard 10.6.3 without the need of the libxml perl library.

In particular I’ve changed the SIGNATURE part to:

SIGNATURE=$(
	myvar=$(security find-generic-password -g -s "Sparkle Private Key" 2>&1 1>/dev/null | sed 's/.*-----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\\012\(.*\)\\012-----END DSA PRIVATE KEY-----.*/-----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\
\1\
-----END DSA PRIVATE KEY-----/g' | sed 's/\\012/\
/g')

echo "$myvar" > tmp.tmp

openssl dgst -sha1 -binary < "$ARCHIVE_FILENAME" \
| openssl dgst -dss1 -sign tmp.tmp \
| openssl enc -base64

rm tmp.tmp
)

So, here’s the script I’m using, if anyone wants it!

set -o errexit

if [[ $BUILD_STYLE != "Deploy" ]]; then
	echo Distribution target requires "'Deploy'" build style
	exit
fi

VERSION=$(defaults read "$BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR/$PRODUCT_NAME.app/Contents/Info" CFBundleVersion)
DOWNLOAD_BASE_URL="http://www.example.com/some_product"
RELEASENOTES_URL="http://www.example.com/some_product/$VERSION.html"

ARCHIVE_FILENAME="${PRODUCT_NAME}_$VERSION.zip"
DOWNLOAD_URL="$DOWNLOAD_BASE_URL/$ARCHIVE_FILENAME"
KEYCHAIN_PRIVKEY_NAME="Sparkle Private Key"

WD=$PWD
cd "$BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR"
rm -f "$PRODUCT_NAME"*.zip
ditto -ck --keepParent "$PRODUCT_NAME.app" "$ARCHIVE_FILENAME"

SIZE=$(stat -f %z "$ARCHIVE_FILENAME")
PUBDATE=$(LC_TIME=en_US date +"%a, %d %b %G %T %z")
SIGNATURE=$(
	myvar=$(security find-generic-password -g -s "Sparkle Private Key" 2>&1 1>/dev/null | sed 's/.*-----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\\012\(.*\)\\012-----END DSA PRIVATE KEY-----.*/-----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\
\1\
-----END DSA PRIVATE KEY-----/g' | sed 's/\\012/\
/g')

echo "$myvar" > tmp.tmp

openssl dgst -sha1 -binary < "$ARCHIVE_FILENAME" \
| openssl dgst -dss1 -sign tmp.tmp \
| openssl enc -base64

rm tmp.tmp
)

[ $SIGNATURE ] || { echo Unable to load signing private key with name "'$KEYCHAIN_PRIVKEY_NAME'" from keychain; false; }

cat > $VERSION.xml <<EOF
<item>
	<title>Version $VERSION</title>
	<sparkle:releaseNotesLink>$RELEASENOTES_URL</sparkle:releaseNotesLink>
	<pubDate>$PUBDATE</pubDate>
	<enclosure
		url="$DOWNLOAD_URL"
		sparkle:version="$VERSION"
		type="application/octet-stream"
		length="$SIZE"
		sparkle:dsaSignature="$SIGNATURE"
	/>
</item>
EOF

In particular in the library you will find:

• Network Manager – easy way to deal with parallel asynchronous network requests
• Image Manager – easy way to download and cache images on the iPhone
• SystemMessage Manager – unified way to display HUD messages across the application, both auto-disappearing or not

If you are interested you can grab the source and compile it for your project, it will create a standard static library that you can include in your projects. Header files have relevant comments that will make your life easier when dealing with the library.

For any feedback don’t hesitate to write over here or at the github page.

Enough talking, just try it out! And here’s two images of the SystemMessageManager displaying its HUD windows:

You can find the latest 6.6.1-5 version here:IM 6.6.1-5
Or if you dare the latest beta 6.6.1-6 here:IM 6.6.1-6

As usual you can find the latest updated working XCode project here:IM_Test project

I’m in talks with the developers of ImageMagick to try and have a “standard” build for iPhone so that everyone can just go there. I will keep you up to date with it.

Please report any issues you might have and especially if now the applications will be accepted by Apple!

Regards,

~C