(priss told me to send this to design) i decided that i want a notification whenever the office calendar is updated. here's what i had to do to subscribe to cosmo's atom feed in my feed reader, google calendar.
i logged into osaf.us and chose the office calendar from my list of calendars. then i opened the collection details dialog and chose "feed reader" from the menu. at this point i wanted to just click a hyperlink, which would allow firefox to take over with its builtin support for sending feeds to external feed readers, but unfortunately we chose not to put a hyperlink in the dialog ;) so i had to copy the collection's atom url, open a new firefox tab, and paste the url into the location bar. this caused firefox to fetch the feed and ask me what i wanted to do with it. i chose "subscribe with google reader", firefox opened google reader, i subscribed, and everything was groovy. if i recall correctly, part of the argument for not having a hyperlink for feed subscriptions in the collection details dialog was that people would have to copy the feed url and then paste it into their feed reader. but the fact is, most people probably aren't going to have to do that: 1) firefox, safari, and i think IE7 have builtin support for feeds. this can take two forms: a - reading the feed in the browser itself (eg firefox' live bookmarks) b - using the browser to aid the process of feed subscription in an external client (firefox, for example, knows how to pass a feed url to readers like google reader, bloglines, feeddemon etc) 2) browsers like IE6 that don't have this builtin support can still be configured to open an external application when the user clicks on a hyperlink that pulls down a feed. i showed priss how this works yesterday. it's super easy (the browser pops up a dialog asking you to either save the feed to a file or open it with an external app) and we can easily provide copy in the dialog or in our docs helping users through it. as far as i can tell, the only time somebody would have to copy the url out of the dialog and paste it somewhere else is if they want to plug the url into a command line program or into the source code for a script - and we already have the "other" selection in the dialog's menu that shows the (exact same) feed url to cover that case. so, in summary, having a hyperlink to click when subscribing to a feed would shorten the process, saving me the trouble of having to copy the url, open an new tab or window, paste the url into the location bar, and hit enter. clicking the link should automatically pop open a new tab or window and go to the feed location without my manual intervention. one other comment, in terms of the actual feed content, i suggest you guys look at what's actually produced in the feed in one or two different reader applications and see what you think of the formatting. it can definitely be improved, but i don't have any explicit suggestions at the moment. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
