AmphetaDesk is a free, cross platform, open-sourced, syndicated news aggregator - it obediently sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage. With thousands of channels available, AmphetaDesk can shave hours off your day - and you'll look smart to all your friends! Egotism never had it better!
AmphetaDesk's powerful backend allows easy modification to the templates and internal source code shipped with your download, whether you're on Mac, Windows, Linux or some unheard of beast from limitless fathoms. Know someone else who tweaked their AmphetaDesk? You can perform the same tweaks on your own, gaining flexibility and control, allowing AmphetaDesk to be all you want and need it to be. Here, we'll talk about various ways of improving your use of AmphetaDesk, as well as walking you through what others have done already.
AmphetaDesk is developed with Perl and XML. All GUI functions are coded in Perl using libraries from the specific OS as well (since forcing the user to download Tk is a bad thing). Runtime versions are built with Perl2EXE (for Windows), MacPerl (for Mac OS 9 and below) and ProjectBuilder (OS X). The latest source code is available from SourceForge CVS and is designed to figure out what OS you're using at the time and load in the correct libraries (although you'll probably need to download and install various modules from CPAN). Besides the module dependency, the source code should work without modification.
AmphetaDesk wouldn't be possible without the contributions of (alphabetically):
Dave Beckett (http header code),
David Berube (who's effort with the Win32 GUI code was impressive),
Tara Calishan (a constant promoter, her insight as a researcher has been invaluable),
Jan Chrillesen (for listing the FreeBSD ports necessary for an AmphetaDesk install),
Chad Cloman (for pointing out my rather idiotic misuse of substr),
William Eastler (who helped get AmphetaDesk off the ground),
Alan Fry (who contributed large amounts of effort to Mac GUI code that has yet to be used),
Steve Ivy (he of constant feature badgering and alpha hack tweaking),
Raun Nohavitza (for a Win32 patch to act properly when started/minimized via a shortcut),
l.m.orchard (for the Mac OS X native GUI wrapper),
Klaus Johannes Rusch (who reworked our networking code to support proxies and more),
Bayle Shanks (for waxing poetic about an easier way to install AmphetaDesk on Debian),
Mads Toftum (contributor of code to fix some channel deletion bugs),
Eric Vitiello (an all around excellent contributer),
and Jeremy Zawodny (for hunting down a few bugs and patching them).
If I've forgotten others, please let me know.
These are old versions. How dare you want these! Scroll up, scroll up!