September 30 2008
RssBucket: Yet Another RSS Reader
I started programming in Objective-C and Cocoa in April. To familiarize myself with the language and framework, I wrote an RSS reader, and I had planned to throw that code away as soon as I felt comfortable building a real application. Of course, then I thought it would be fun to release that reader to the public. So, here it is: RssBucket (for 10.5). I’m making the source code available as well (for Xcode/IB 3.1), under the MIT license, so feel free to use it wherever.
My previous Cocoa tutorials about link arrows, badges, and dates were extracted from the application. It has a standard source list, with feeds, favicons, and counts. To the right is a list of the selected feed’s entries, with a more human-readable date and a link arrow to open the entry in the default web browser. Below the list is a web view that opens the URL for the selected entry. When you shut the application down, it saves off the feed list in your Preferences using NSUserDefaults. And updating occurs on a different thread from the UI.
RssBucket is very much a sample application. It works, but if you want a fully-functional Mac RSS reader, you should check out the excellent and free NetNewsWire.
