WP7

  • RTE News Reader pulled from the Marketplace

    RTE News Reader pulled from the Marketplace

    So I guess this was inevitable but RTE sent a cease and desist letter to me via the Windows Phone marketplace tonight. Their reasons for asking for me to take down the app were that I was using the RTE logo (fair enough) and for using the public RSS feeds which according to their terms are for personal use only....even though I never made a cent from the app.

  • RTE News Reader for Windows Phone gets a new update

    Just a quick post to say that my RTE News Reader app for Windows Phone has been upgraded to version 1.6. This new version fixes a small bug that prevented users from re-read the same article after they returned to the article from IE. The big improvement for this version is that the app now displays the content from rte.ie within it. I don't open up the web browser in a separate window anymore.

    This proved a little tricky to do as it meant I had to scrape the site and parse the HTML. I did this by using the excellent HTML Agility Pack for Windows Phone. The one gotcha here was that I had to make sure I encoded my web calls correctly. The default encoding was making Irish words or euro symbols come out all weird.

    It's great to get another release of this app out the door. Hopefully you'll like it!

  • New update for RTE News Reader app coming out shortly

    I've just submitted a new update to the Windows Marketplace for my RTE News Reader app. This update is only a minor update but includes a fix to a nasty bug that was forcing some news articles to not display.

    The bug was caused by badly formatted XML from RTE.ie - rogue ampersands to be precise. I was able to track down that it was badly formatted XML by using a simple XML validate checker - http://validator.w3.org/feed/ This checker highlights everywhere that the feed could be failing.

    Once I could see the issues I then had to put in a workaround. The problem with just replacing &'s is that they are also going to be used for valid html encoded values in the XML. I had to ensure that I was replacing single ampersands only. I was able to do this by using a regular expression to find single instances of ampersands in the text and replaced them with html encoded versions of themselves. This Stackoverflow article discusses how to implement such a fix: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/121511/reading-xml-with-an-into-c-sharp-xmldocument-object

    The app is now going through the usual approval processes in the App Hub. All going well, it should be available for download by the end of next week.

     

  • RTE News Reader hits the Windows Marketplace

    RTE News Reader App for Windows Phone

    Over Christmas I decided to dip my toes into making a Windows Phone app for my Lumia 800. If there's one app that I was missing when I moved over to Windows Phone from iOS it was the RTE app. There was no official app so I went about making a quick little app to pull in their RSS feed and make readings the news stories a bit easier to consume on the phone.

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