Enclosures

20 September 2004

NetNewsWire 2.0 recognizes RSS enclosures. Enclosures are links to files—often media files such as movies and MP3s—included in news items.

In the screen shot below, note that the enclosure link appears with the dateline at the bottom of the description.

To open the enclosure, just click the link. (But remember that it’s just like anything else you download from the web, there’s no guarantee of safety.)

Enclosures and AppleScript

NetNewsWire does not automatically download enclosures for you at night the way Radio UserLand does. However, you can access enclosures via AppleScript and write scripts that do the downloading. (Hopefully somebody will write such a script and release it. Consider this a hint.)

Via AppleScript you can get the URL, size, and type of enclosures. Here’s a sample script (which assumes you’ve subscribed to Adam Curry’s weblog).

tell application NetNewsWire"
	
	set sub to first subscription whose
		display name contains "Curry"
	set newsItem to (first headline whose
		enclosure URL is not equal to "")
		of sub
	set link to enclosure URL of newsItem
	set len to enclosure length of newsItem
	set type to enclosure type of newsItem
	
	"URL: " & link & return &
		"length: " & len & return
		& "type: " & type
end tell

(Note that some of the lines are wrapped so they’ll fit in this web page. The lines starting with “set sub,” “set newsItem,” and “"URL:” should each be just one line.)