Below are some of the more common questions asked about Vienna while it was being pre-release tested. See the Official Vienna FAQ Page for these and the latest hints and tips for using Vienna.
Post a message over in the Support forum or in the issues list and somebody will investigate. Provide as much information about the problem as you can can: the build of Vienna (obtained from the About Vienna panel), repro steps and what you expected to happen. There is a sticky note in the forum with tips on how to write a good bug report.
Make sure you're always running the most recent build of Vienna. The Check for Updates command will report if there's a newer build available than the one you have.
Fixes for bugs take priority over new features so if your problem is confirmed to be a bug with high impact and no simple workaround then we'll look at making a fix available as soon as reasonably possible.
Open the Activity Window from the Window menu. The activity window shows all subscriptions and the status of the last time they were refreshed in that session. The bottom of the activity window shows more details include the HTTP headers and may be useful for debugging. (If the details pane is not visible, grab the split bar at the bottom of the Activity Window and drag it up to uncover the pane).
First, you need to understand that Open Reader services do not provide authentication to a third party server. Vienna will need to have a direct access to a server if it requires authentication. So, when you subscribe, make sure the "Subscribe in Open Reader" checkbox is UNchecked.
Then, it is important to know that there are two main methods that servers use to authenticate an user who requests an XML feed :
A difficulty lies in the fact that many servers will not explicitly state which method they require.
Requiring a username and a password is the most frequent method. It is also the most
transparent for the user. On first refresh, Vienna will present you with a dialog box
where you can enter the username and the password that has been provided to you.
You can check that you have provided these credentials to Vienna (and update them if
necessary) through the 'Info' window associated to the feed (which you can access through
the 'Folder → Get Info…' menu or through the contextual menu you get when you right-click
on the feed in Vienna's left pane).
Note that the password is securely stored in Apple's Keychain.
For servers which require a cookie, the username and password must NOT be set in the
'Info' window. Both fields MUST be left blank.
Instead, you will need to log in to the website through Safari or through a web browser
tab in Vienna.
A problem is that you may need, from time to time, to re-log in again, because cookies can
expire.
By default, your Vienna database is the messages.db file which is located at ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna. You can move this to another folder if you wish. The following steps show how:
It means that Vienna got a feed back from the subscription that it couldn't interpret. There are several reasons for this:
If none of the above explain the problem, post a message on the support forum with the URL of the feed exhibiting the problem.
Probably. There are single key equivalents for some of the menu commands such as:
Spacebar - goes to the next unread article. If the current article is several pages long, it will scroll through that article first. If you're at the end of the current article it will then go to the next unread article. By contrast the Next Unread command (Cmd+U) always goes straight to the next unread article.
R - marks the current article read if it is unread, or unread if it is read.
F - flags the current article if it isn't already flagged, or removes the existing flag if it is not.
Look in the Vienna Help file for more shortcuts.
The blue dots are for new articles, and the green dots are for updated articles: articles whose text has changed since they were last downloaded.
Auto-expire moves articles older than a certain number of days to the Trash folder. It allows you to keep your folders manageable by only retaining articles that are recent. The auto-expire runs both when Vienna starts and after you have refreshed any subscriptions. To control the age of articles to auto-expire, change the "Move articles to Trash" option in Preferences.
Auto-expire will NOT remove unread or flagged articles. It assumes that you haven't read these articles and thus leaves them alone.
See the Custom Styles page for instructions.
Vienna's scripts are written using AppleScript. See the Apple resource page for more details.
One way to get started is to download one of the existing scripts like Cortig's original Share with Papers plugin or reefdog's Vienna to Yojimbo script and view them in the AppleScript editor.
To submit your own script, send it the support forum and after it has been reviewed, it will be made available on the Downloads page.
Post a message over at the issues list.
See the Development page for instructions for getting the source code for Vienna. The source code is freely available if you're interested in learning how Vienna works, if you want to build your own copy of Vienna from scratch on your own machine or if you want to borrow portions for inclusion in your own project. The source is provided under the Apache 2.0 license.