When displaying articles in the message view Pineapple News will attempt to locate various types of URLs, highlight them in customizable colors, and turn them into clickable links. When you click on them with the mouse it will try to launch them in whatever program you have specified to handle that type of URL. This is an advanced feature that will only work if you've registered the program.
For clickable URLs to work you must specify applications to handle each type. You make the associations using the FileTypes preferences application which is supplied with BeOS. Start at the Be Menu, go to Preferences, then click FileTypes. On the left side of the window you'll see a list of top-level MIME types. All the ones we will be concerned with are in the "application" group so click on the arrow to the left of it to open up that part of the list.
Following is the list of URL types that Pineapple News knows about and their associated MIME types.
You should see these file types near the bottom of the list. If you don't see all of them then exit the FileTypes application, run Pineapple News, and try again. The program adds all file types it knows about to the MIME types database when it first starts up if they do not already exist.
(Note for purists: Most of these types exist on all BeOS installations but for some reason Be didn't create a MIME type for e-mail address URLs so I had to make one up myself. I'm not sure if the one for news URLs is stock or not. It was on my system but it may have been put there by one of the many newsreaders I've installed.)
Click a MIME type you're interested in then select the application you want to handle that particular type from the drop-down list or with the "Select..." button. You may get a warning message like this:
The application that you selected as preferred does not seem to handle this file type. Do you still want to set it as a preferred application for this file type?
I wouldn't worry too much about this. Most of the apps I picked to handle URLs on my own machine gave me this warning but they work fine anyway.
Okay, you can see that URLs are highlighted in the message view, but what can you do with them? When the mouse is over a URL the cursor will change to indicate that fact. Then you have several options.
You can press the primary mouse button and release it to launch the URL in whatever application is appropriate. Or you can drag the URL to a Tracker window, the desktop, or some other window that can accept dropped files to create a bookmark. The bookmark file can be double-clicked later on to launch the URL. This is handy if you are not currently connected to the Internet. (You can set the preferred application to handle bookmark files in the FileTypes preferences app, described earlier on this page.)
Finally, you can right-click on the URL to get a menu of options. The first option is Launch, which is the same as if you'd clicked on it with the primary mouse button. The second option is Copy to clipboard, which makes the URL text available to other programs.
The program contains default highlight colors for each URL type which you can customize to your liking. For more information see the help topic PineappleNews.ini Reference.
E-mail URL handlers I tested two apps with e-mail URLs: BeMail, the minimal mail client that comes bundled with BeOS, and Beatware's Mail-It. Both work fine.
HTTP (web site) handlers At this writing there are only two BeOS web browsers you might use to handle HTTP URLs: NetPositive and Opera. Pineapple News works with both of them. However you should make sure you are using the latest version of Opera. I had trouble with version 3.62 RC1 but 3.62 Final works just fine. Actually I suppose there is also Mozilla but I've never tried that. If anybody gets it to work you should send me an e-mail.
HTTPS (secure web site) handlers NetPositive and Opera both work. Whether or not they are able to deal with the type of encryption used by any particular secure site is another matter.
File handlers NetPositive and Opera both work.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) handlers I tested three apps: NetPositive, Beatware's Get-It, and Opera. NetPositive and Opera worked fine (but see the earlier note about Opera versions). Get-It opens up in response to the launch request but does not establish a connection to the site. Oh well.
NNTP URL handlers Ahem. Even though Pineapple News is a newsreader it does not know how to handle this URL type. Sorry. One of these days I hope to have an add-on app that can handle these. I didn't try any other apps but there's nothing stopping you from using a different newsreader for this if you want to.
RSTP URL handlers There is only one that will work, as far as I know: The RealPlayer application that comes with the commercial version of BeOS 5.0 or later. It is not included in the free version. I tried it on a Real streamed movie and it worked fine.
Telnet handlers I tried this type with Dianne Hackborn's ArpTelnet, which worked fine.
This section details technical information about how Pineapple News launches URLs. It might be of help when evaluating whether a particular app will work or if you want to write your own URL handler app.
The program uses the Launch() function of the roster. There are many different versions of Launch() so the following code snippet shows how Pineapple News does it:
static char url[] = "http://www.be.com";BeOS will find the associated app via the file types database and launch it with the argument string given in argv, the same as if you'd run the program from the terminal and given it a URL on the command line.
Note that Pineapple News makes all URL strings "official" before it sends them on to the handler app. In other words, say the following two strings were in the original article:
thisguy@something.net
www.happy.com
When Pineapple News sends them to a handler app they will look like this:
mailto:thisguy@something.net
http://www.happy.com
So that's pretty much all there is to know. A handler app must be able to accept fully qualified URLs on the command line. There are no other special requirements.