Please, somebody could do a RSSowl Portable?
It is lacking because the original project
is not updated anymore.
I am having much difficulty to make RSSOwl Portable
really portable.
Why they dont have the database portable also?
Please, folks, help.
[]s
Rodrigo Cesar Banhara
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For now, I think the best option would be to try to use the current (outdated) version here, which is the one I assume you were talking about, and put the files from the newest version of RSSOwl in there.
There's a few problems with making the application "completely portable". The first of which is that the built-in browser uses IE, which pretty much stops it from being fully portable immediately. There are ways of specifying an alternate browser location, but the database is not text editor friendly, so dynamically assigning the custom browser to something like Chrome or Firefox portable is hard, if not impossible.
The second thing to note is that RSSOwl uses the registry by itself, because it's an Eclipse-based application. I forget if those values are useful in any practical way, but they need to be dealt with.
The last issue is that, yes, it's a Java application. Admittedly, it's not that hard to make one portable now, but it's still a little bit of a problem.
I took a personal shot at RSSOwl at some point, and I'll post my launcher.ini file so that it might help you:
The second 2 FileWrite commands don't work properly (I think), and "jopt" was my folder for storing a generic .opml file that formed the template for the first run of RSSOwl. Cheers, and I hope this helps.
With all the hoopla about Google Reader shutting down, I decided to see what could be done about offline readers. I've used RSSOwl in the past, but found it having issues with the portability. Now I know why.
Thanks for the input. If you think you can bang out the launcher.ini, I'll give it another go and see if it is worth the issues to try again.
Honestly, I'd just use the portable version of QuiteRSS even though it's not the same feel or feature set as RSSOwl. It still works fine and it's already been certified as an official portable app. As for the launcher, you can try to make it work, but I've abandoned it a while ago now.
Oh, I do use QuiteRSS and like it for the bit of tech news I get at work. Very lightweight and with the addition of being able to see subfolder feeds in one view, most to my liking as well.
I used RSSOwl for the offline capabilities, which I felt were better at the time. I should see what it is like nowadays.
Hi. I don't know if this helps at all, but I use the portable version of RSSOwl from their own site and have relocated the prefs and feeds folder by following the instructions on their forum here -
http://www.rssowl.org/help%23item_9
It's about a third of the way down under "How do I specify the location of the profile folder?".
It's done what I want, which is to make it a self-contained app so that I shouldn't lose all my feeds and prefs every time I wipe/restore my Windows partition, but it isn't strictly fully portable as it isn't a relative path so you'd either have to work that out or change the path in config.ini before running it from a new location.
I'm not completely sure about registry entries as I only discovered this solution today so haven't tested it very thoroughly as yet, but MJRegWatcher didn't seem to pick up on anything, and neither has a search for "Owl" using Nirsoft's RegScanner.
Also I had problems making this work on my desktop office PC today, but I've been having all kinds of problems on that PC anyway trying to get CIS6 to work properly (grrr...) and I suspect it is preventing RSSOwl from creating the new directory properly, but back at home on my laptop it seems to be fine - I've rebooted a couple of times now and Owl is working great with no sign of any files/folders being created in my User directory or anywhere other than where I've told it to.
Naturally you still need JRE to be installed, and I'm really thinking of just using QuiteRSS too as it is a great prog and a lot lighter and faster than Owl. But I really really like Owl so I'm sticking with it for now.
All the best, I hope this is helpful.
When I originally made my personal test a while back, I was looking for such an option. Thanks for finding it in the documentation; I might actually test it myself to see if it's viable.
I'll be interested to hear how it goes.
I took Owl to my desktop office PC this evening on my flash drive with the edited config.ini, and ran it on a fresh restore of W7 (having finally sussed the CIS6 problem) - On first run it failed and started as if freshly installed, and also wrote a profile folder to the root of the drive that I'd copied it to. Odd because the actual path is the same as on my laptop, i.e. D:\Portable Apps\etc.
On quitting and running it again though, it was fine and opened up all my feeds and prefs. No idea why it should have done that (I wonder if there is a reg entry or more that I've not found), I'll see if I can fathom it sometime in VM when I get a chance.
Check out my first comment. The launcher.ini file I had created mentioned a registry key that was being used. I just have no memory of what it actually did.
Apparently, the way I handled the home directory before was in the "RSSOwl.ini" file that is used by the program. It seemed to work well:
That's why I didn't know about the proper way of doing things... I just changed the user.home location directly.
I don't know if anybody is still following this topic, but I finally have a fully working portable version of RSSOwl.
The problem before was that the solution given in the FAQ on the RSSOwl site didn't really work. For me it was still creating a data directory in my User directory, and forgetting all my subscriptions etc.
Anyway today I found this alternative edit for the config.ini file - http://beautifuldiscovery.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/howto-make-rssowl-int... - and it works a treat. I set it up on my desktop office PC today then took it home on my flash drive and ran it on my laptop and everything is there... preferences and subscriptions all present and correct and nothing created in my User directories.
Because I didn't want to install JRE I just copied the portable version of that into \RSSOwl\jre\ and it works fine. I don't know if I really need the whole 124 mb of JRE but it will do for now.
I know it's not really the PAF way but I thought I'd post anyway in case anyone is still inclined to work on this project. I tried to d/l a fresh copy of Owl today to try the process from scratch, but sadly the site appears to be broken. Hopefully that's just a temporary or local thing.
If I recall correctly, RSSOwl uses the internet explorer browser component internally to do all rendering. So it will leave cache files (html, images, javascript, etc) and cookies on every PC. As such, it can't ever be portable.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks, yes I think you're probably right, I don't really know all the ins and outs of it. I'll run a monitor/snapshot app sometime to see exactly what it does do.
As it is now though, it seems to run happily enough portably as opposed to stealth-portably which is good enough for my needs, i.e. a non-install version.
I've never tried making a proper paf version of anything, maybe this would be good project to start with if I can access the site again and communicate with the devs.