This evening I made a copy of the Doppler code tree and did something radical. I deleted the RSS Parser and File downloader code from Doppler.

Why? I wanted to check out if I could make use of the new Windows RSS Platform API. That’s an API that will be available in Vista and XP (if you run XP it will be installed if you install Internet Explorer 7 or Office 2007). The idea behind is that you have a single storage for all your feed subscriptions, and a unified way of downloading and parsing feeds, regardless of their format (RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 or Atom). The idea is that when you subscribe to a feed in tool X it will be also available in tool Y.

Subscribing to a feed in IE7 will make that feed also available in Doppler for instance. And vice versa. Makes sense. Doppler can then ask the RSS Platform to download a certain enclosure (asynchronously) and Windows will take care of the rest. The moment the file is done downloading Doppler can pick it up (it will be downloaded by default to your temporary internet files), move it to the appropriate location, rewrite the tags if needed and add it to your media player of choice. I think that’s really nice. It will take a lot out of the complexity of Doppler so I can focus more on the management part of downloading podcasts.

Of course, it will take a while before this Windows RSS Platform API is available on all clients (you will either have to install IE7, Office 2007 or Vista), so that’s why it probably will not happen earlier than Doppler 4. Nevertheless, it will come.

Oh yes, Doppler did work as expected with the changed APIs.

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