Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

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Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

This evening I've tryed to play a bit with Doppler Mobile, all exciting to have found the mobile RSS Reader I need, but actually I'm a bit disappointed.

Doppler Mobile is too much a beta, it's really a promising product but it has also lots of problems.

I've installed it on my Windows Mobile Smartphone with success, then I've tryed to add a feed (in my test I've added the main feed of ASP.NET Weblogs, located at http://weblogs.asp.net/MainFeed.aspx. The feed was correctly recognized (the application on the main page of the subscribed feeds shows the feed title and the number of unreaded post) but when I've tryed to read the posts, the application had an unexpected crash. Every action that I was trying to do after adding a feed, caused a crash on the application.
The error reported was:

DopplerMobile.exe ArgumentException in Microsoft.AGL.Common.MISC.Handler()
in System.Drawing.Icon._InitFromMemoryStream()
........
(too long to be reported here)
and it seems to be an error on a resource (an icon?) created on the main form of DopplerMobile.
What is curious is that, when adding a feed, Doppler creates a folder (in my case \Storage Card\Application Data\Doppler) with these files:
35DF3780.fbz 19,5 Kb
35DF3780.ico 0 kb
Settings.dms
(the number are random generated and are relatives to the feeds cache).
If you remove the .ico files (empty file) and then re-launch Doppler Mobile, the application works, otherwise it has always a crash.
Why this?
Second, I've discovered that if you add a feed and then immediately exit the application (without reading feeds), Doppler seems to saves every settings correctly and the crash is avoided.

The second noisy problem is that when I read a post on my Smartphone (by selecting the post via the list under the selected feed) the text area that appears you (with the entire post content) start blinking (:C) and I can't scroll the entire text. I can read only the text that feets on my display, I can't scroll....

I've signalled these bugs to the Doppler staff and I hope on a response (and on a solution).

Print | posted on Wednesday, December 28, 2005 11:23 PM

Comments on this post

# re: Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

Hi Stefano!

The reason we're doing public beta's this time is that for Doppler (DopplerMobile's big brother) until we always did closed beta's, but handling the closed beta's actually is a lot of work (there's just me doing the development) so this time we decided to go for a public beta. The end result is, indeed, that you might run into a lot of problems. As I state on the download page actually (http://www.dopplerradio.net/dopplermobile-beta)

Still, you dared to download it and install it! :-) Good!

Appearantly there seems to be something -in- the feed that DopplerMobile doesn't like combined with a problem with the icon.

You can safely remove all fbz files (do -not- remove feeds.fbz) as they are all cached versions of the RSS feed (btw, the filenames are not randomly generated, they are hex versions of a hashcode generated based upon the feed title, and some other parameters, but that's a side track ;-) ). I will try to figure out what's going wrong in your case.

Regarding the scrolling problem, I've noticed that too and it has to do with the webbrowser component provided to me in .NET 2.0 which causes this.

The 'solution' (it's more a workaround/temporary 'fix') can be found at: http://www.dopplerradio.net/dopplermobile-beta-getting-started/#readingfeeds

Basically you will have to turn off the viewing of images in pocket internet explorer.

Left by Erwin on Dec 28, 2005 8:41 PM

# re: Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

All small update: I can reproduce the problem with the feed, which is in a way good, because it means I can start my debugger and fix this :-)

Left by Erwin on Dec 28, 2005 8:47 PM

# re: Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

And another update.

I'll try to explain where it goes wrong.

DopplerMobile uses the following algorithm for downloading the feed icon:

It checks if the 'link' tag was specified in the RSS feed.

It then 'strips' the URL to only remain the host part (http://weblogs.asp.net). Then it checks if at that level the favicon.ico file is available. So in this case it tries to open:

http://weblogs.asp.net/favicon.ico

If I open that URL in the browser I get an error page from the .Text blogging software used at weblogs.asp.net. However, what .Text fails to do is to set a correct error state in the HTTP header. If you check out the header info you see that while it should return a 404 Not Found, it actually returns a 200 OK. Which of course is not correct. DopplerMobile then opens the 'stream' it gets from the webserver and saves it as an icon (or least, it -thinks- it's receiving an icon). But in reality it's downloading a page full of text telling that there is no icon. Hence the error message you get while trying to open the feed.

I cannot fix .Text (it's obviously an error in .Text too), but I will make DopplerMobile a bit less critical...

Left by Erwin on Dec 28, 2005 9:18 PM

# re: Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

Thanks a lot for your feedbacks Erwin, this is the first signal that Doppler Mobile will be a great product.
I hope on a little bug fix soon. Regarding the problem of the favicon.ico file and .Text, is it possible to save a default icon if the favicon.ico is not correctly downloaded? This should avoid the error problem.

Left by Stefano Demiliani on Dec 29, 2005 5:53 AM

# re: Doppler Mobile: too much a beta! :)

Erwin, disabling the images on Pocket IE solved the post reading problems, thanks!
For blogs that caused the favicon.ico problem (such as weblogs.asp.net) I've temporary solved by manually deleting the generated empty .ico files from my data folder.
Now Doppler Mobile works good!

I hope soon on an update however...

Left by Stefano Demiliani on Dec 30, 2005 11:54 AM

# DopplerMobile beta 3 available

Erwin just released beta 3 of DopplerMobile! He lists the changes and some bugfixes on his blog. Start...

Left by David Boschmans' Weblog on Dec 30, 2005 10:05 AM

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