cloud goes social

Hi,
I’m using Google Reader, as an aggregator for all the feeds that I want to follow. Great! So I don’t have to keep those 6 tabs open in my favorite browser, right? Well, kind of. The problem resides in the fact that then I would still have my mail and calendar open. And google reader. And …

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

So,
for a project that I’m working on (Reader Notifier Reloaded, more about it in a following post), I’ve been using Sparkle. It is a great tool for providing updates to the users.

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