Introduction to Vienna


Vienna is a Mac OSX off-line message reader for online communities. It's primary purpose is to store and display messages retrieved from the community service, allow users to step through those messages and distinguish between those that are read and those that are new, automatically connect to the service to retrieve new messages and to allow users to post new messages and replies.

Vienna is a personal project that I began in order to learn to program on my new Apple Powerbook. I picked Vienna because I am a long time member of the CIX online community and the author of the official CIX off-line reader, Ameol. Vienna represents an evolution of Ameol that I had in my mind for a long time but until now, never got around to writing.

Vienna is freeware and the current version supports both the CIX conferencing system and RSS feeds. If you are not a CIX subscriber then you can sign up from their home page.

Hardware Requirements

To run Vienna, you will need:

  1. Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) or later.
  2. At least 256Mb RAM.
  3. A dial-up or broadband internet connection.

In addition, you will need a subscription to CIX.

Technical Support

Technical support for Vienna is available through the vienna conference once you have your CIX subscription. To join the conference, choose Join from the Folders menu and enter vienna. The next time you connect, you will be automatically joined to the conference.

For support outside of CIX, send e-mail to Christine Caulfield.

Source Code

The source code to Vienna is available from here.