Check your Gmail with Touchstone

Over on our Development blog Paul has made a great discovery - here's a quote:

Unfortunately, due to the complexities of the Gmail authentication system, attempting to subscribe to http://gmail.google.com gets you nowhere. All is not lost however! Subscribe to https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom, enter your username and password, and Touchstone will check gmail for you. Nifty.

That's cool!

Thanks Paul.

How does Touchstone work? Find out here...

For the life of me I can't work out why Paul, our new (for about 4.5 months ago) uber-programmer, didn't get a proper welcome to the team on this blog. Ash and I have always welcomed new team members etc. I will blame myself entirely.

Paul, over those last 4.5 months, has done an amazing job. You will notice a huge difference in the beta in the areas of performance overall and the ticker usability specifically. You need to email to thank him :)

The reason I am pointing all this out, though, is because Paul has started a series of great posts about how Touchstone works. Or at least how we have solved seemingly simple problems that actually amount to a complex web of systems and subsystems to make an application work 'as you'd expect'.

So.. Check out the Touchstone Developers blog and specifically you can start with these few:

Authenticated Feeds (A big feature request from the testers!)

Indexing Firefox History (Firefox is our friend)

Proxy Support (a HUGE feature request from our testers)

More to come so be sure to subscribe to the feed.

Thanks Paul!