Reddybrek.com

RTE News Reader pulled from the Marketplace

Filed under app , C# , windowsphone , wp7

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.

This sucks. I must have spent at least a few hundred hours on the app from design to development to support. I was working on a Windows Phone 8 version of the app which sadly won't see the light of day now.

No point dwelling on the negativity though. I got the experience of working on a windows phone app which was great fun and my app remained in the top 10 free apps since its release nearly a year ago.

I had nearly 7,000 downloads of the app which was good going for an Irish app in the marketplace.

The app has now been removed from the store. Roll on the next venture!

New update for RTE News Reader app coming out shortly

Filed under app , C# , wp7 , xml

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.