Working on ShareFire

I’m a big fan of the RSS reader AIR app ShareFire and decided to help out adding to it.

One feature I’d like to see in ShareFire is the ability to add my feeds to Google Reader through ShareFire. One of the things that annoys me about Google Reader is when you mark a set of feeds as read, then when you next go to Reader, there are marked as unread.

I do like the way ShareFire works and some of the features it has (sending feeds to Twitter, linking to Google bookmarks etc). So the feature I’d like to add is the ability to use Google Reader as a resource to store feeds, but access them through ShareFire. So I can have a version of ShareFire at home access the same feeds as my work computer.

So I downloaded the source code, spent a while trying to get it running locally (to see the problems I had go to the ShareFire Google group and read the threads).

My plan is to allow users to log into their Google reader account in the setting panel and decide to use reader as a place to store feeds and access them in ShareFire. Of course if a user isn’t using reader they don’t have to and can still use ShareFire as they do now.

To start this work I’m going to create a test AIR app that connects to Google reader and will:

• Load my feeds
• Add a feed
• Remove a feed

Not much, but has the features that I want to add to ShareFire. Once my test app is running I can then work on ShareFire.

I’ll try to keep updating this blog on the work on the prototype and then ShareFire.