NetNewsWire 1.0.7

Grok Headline matches for NetNewsWire 1.0.7

NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.7
released

NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.7
released 12/22/2003 02:58 PM
This release of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.7 adds support for favicons and feed URLs, boosts performance, and fixes dozens of bugs. The full version includes a new widescreen view especially suited for laptops.

See Wha t’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7 for details.

NetNewsWire, NetNewsWire Lite updated to
v1.0.7

NetNewsWire, NetNewsWire Lite updated to
v1.0.7 12/22/2003 06:30 PM
Ranchero Software today released NetNewsWire 1.0.7, the latest version of its easy-to-use RSS newsreader for Mac OS X...

NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8

NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8 02/10/2004 02:51 AM
NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8 fix a couple small but important bugs and add a bunch of feeds to the Sites Drawer.

See Wha t’s New in 1.0.8 for details.

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 out

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 out 03/15/2003 08:20 AM
Ranchero reports on the release of NetNewsWire 1.0.1, the greatest RSS reader for the mac, and the only shareware product...

NetNewsWire 1.0.7b7

NetNewsWire 1.0.7b7 12/18/2003 01:08 PM
NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.7b7 have been posted.

In the process of working on 1.1, we fixed a mach port leak and some performance bugs, and we didn’t want to wait until 1.1 before making these fixes available, so we decided to do a 1.0.7 release.

1.0.7 also contains a few of the smaller features that were planned for 1.1: a new wid escreen view is especially suited to laptops; favicons< /a> are now displayed in the Subscriptions pane; NetNewsWire now responds to the f eed URL scheme.

See the change notes for more new features and bug fixes.

The features chart comparing NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite has been updated.

NetNewsWire 1.0.6

NetNewsWire 1.0.6 10/29/2003 07:09 PM
There are so many good things to say about NetNewsWire that it is hard to find anything wrong with it. By Bryron Hinson (ActiveMac via MyAppleMenu)

NetNewsWire 1.0.1

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 03/14/2003 06:18 PM
NetNewsWire is a scriptable RSS reader and weblog editor. Cha nges in this release include bug fixes in both the news reader and the weblog editor.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire 03/13/2003 10:16 AM
Brent has a new beta of NetNewsWireLite out. This one contains redirection and bandwidth monitoring, the two hot topics du...

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b3

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b3 03/11/2003 09:44 AM
NetNewsWire 1.0.1b3 includes a variety of bug fixes.

One of the most common causes of problems in both the news reader and the weblog editor is unencoded ampersands—and NetNewsWire is now more forgiving of this error.

Downloading categories from Radio UserLand weblogs should work again. (It was broken in a recent beta.)

See the cha nge notes for more info.

NetNewsWire 1.0.8

NetNewsWire 1.0.8 12/17/2004 06:35 PM
NetNewsWire is an easy-to-use RSS Web newsreader for Mac OS X. Its familiar three-paned interface -- similar to Apple Mail and Outlook Express -- can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news.

NetNewsWire 1.0

NetNewsWire 1.0 02/12/2003 01:04 AM
NetNewsWire 1.0 has officially shipped. Which is great news. Thanks to Brent for all the work he did in getting this out. The only problems

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b5

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b5 03/11/2003 02:00 PM
NetNewsWire 1.0.1b5 fixes some crashing bugs, partly fixes a bug regarding Movable Type categories, and moves commands from the View menu to the Window menu. (Commands that should have been in the Window menu to begin with, since they have to do with opening and hiding windows.)

Read the cha nge notes for the full scoop.

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b2

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b2 03/11/2003 09:44 AM
NetNewsWire 1.0.1b2 contains mostly fixes for the new XML-RPC code the weblog editor uses.

It’s still a beta! There are plenty more bugs to fix.

By the way, I hope to release my new XML-RPC client under a BSD license some time this week.

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b4

NetNewsWire 1.0.1b4 03/11/2003 09:44 AM
NetNewsWire 1.0.1b4 fixes some news-reading bugs.

Read the cha nge notes for the full scoop.

New NetNewsWire 2.0 betas

New NetNewsWire 2.0 betas 02/05/2005 09:06 PM
Ranchero Software today announced new public beta versions of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite. I've been a beta tester for a while now, and I have to say (along with a lot of other people) that Brent runs the best damn...

NetNewsWire Goes To Version 2

NetNewsWire Goes To Version 2 09/22/2004 10:44 AM
The public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 is out, and it has a ton of new, and interesting features. In particularly for me, the Smart List feature is really interesting. Look likes the role of MyAppleMenu.com plays in the grand scheme of things is diminishing.

Beta: NetNewsWire 2.0b3

Beta: NetNewsWire 2.0b3 09/23/2004 11:22 AM
The RSS and Atom newsreader adds flagged items that are kept indefinitely, incremental searches, an embedded web browser, and other changes.

NetNewsWire and Atom

NetNewsWire and Atom 12/22/2003 05:24 PM
We’re getting some people asking about our plans for Atom support in NetNewsWire. Here’s the deal:

A future version of NetNewsWire will support the Atom syndication format. The weblog editor will also support the Atom API.

That’s it. There isn’t really anything else to say.

NetNewsWire 1.0.8fc1

NetNewsWire 1.0.8fc1 01/24/2004 09:30 PM
NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8fc1 are the same as 1.0.8b1 except that the Sites Drawer has been updated with new feeds. Two new categories, Movies and Music, were created.

We’re looking for deal-stopper bugs. If none are found, we’ll change the version number to 1.0.8 and release it.

NetNewsWire Updated

NetNewsWire Updated 12/22/2003 05:26 PM
Ranchero Software has updated NetNewsWire, its popular newsfeed aggregator for Mac OS X. Version 1.0.7 offers many improvements, including support for newsfeed favicons, a new widescreen view format, quick subscribing from feed: URLs, and other performance enhancements. NetNewsWire is $39.95. A free version, with less functionality, is also available.

What’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7

What’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7 12/23/2003 04:58 AM
NetNewsWire

ranchero.com/netnewswire/whatsnew/netnewswire107.php
track this site | 4 links

NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8

NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8 12/17/2004 06:35 PM
NetNewsWire Lit is an easy-to-use RSS Web newsreader for Mac OS X. Its familiar three-paned interface - similar to Apple Mail and Outlook Express - can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news.

NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.7

NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.7 12/23/2003 04:29 PM
An easy-to-use RSS Web newsreader for Mac OS X.

About NetNewsWire Lite

About NetNewsWire Lite 05/20/2004 01:12 PM
Peter R. Wood asked on the comments for the previous post if there would be any commitment to releasing new versions of NetNewsWire Lite.

Yes. We plan to continue NetNewsWire Lite. It will continue to be free. The next release of Lite will ship on or about the same day NetNewsWire ships.

Switched to NetNewsWire

Switched to NetNewsWire 01/15/2003 01:42 AM
Well, it's official. Last Friday I switched to NetNewsWire Lite even after I managed to break it. I've found that AmpehtaDesk is a memory hog and I simply don't have the time to deal with upgrading, making sure that AmphetaOutlines...

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 Ships

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 Ships 03/14/2003 05:06 PM
NetNewsWire 1.0.1 has been released! Here’s the Wha t’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.1 page. The biggest changes since 1.0 are crashing bug fixes.

But there are some other nice things too—the news reader, for instance, is more forgiving of feeds with errors, so parsing failures will happen less often.

Today I’m starting work on 1.0.2, which will include more bug fixes but also some new features. Based on the feedback I’ve been getting, it sounds like what’s most wanted are new features for the weblog editor—specifically, support for more Radio and Movable Type options.

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 released

NetNewsWire 1.0.1 released 03/14/2003 07:33 PM
Ranchero Software today released NetNewsWire 1.0.1, the latest version of the company's popular RSS news reader and weblog editor...

Safari, RSS, NetNewsWire

Safari, RSS, NetNewsWire 06/28/2004 02:57 PM

“So, Brent, what do you think of Apple putting RSS reading into Safari?”

The first thing to know is that we have no intention of stopping NetNewsWire development.

The second thing is, I’m not surprised. I half-expected it last year, and this year I’d heard rumors (even seen some screen shots) before WWDC, so it’s no shock. Syndication is such great technology, it makes sense for Apple—and Microsoft—to add RSS reading to their systems.

The RSS reader in Safari is not a full-featured newsreader, at least from what I could tell by the demo. For instance, it doesn’t appear to remember what items you’ve read or tell you how many unread items you have. And some of the other features that it does have—such as RSS searching—are coming in NetNewsWire 2.0.

So... even with Safari’s RSS reader, there is still a need for newsreaders that do more. (Much more.)

What I like about this announcement is that it popularizes syndication. Despite its fast growth, there’s still a huge education job to do. The average Mac user doesn’t know about the technology yet, but putting it in Safari means they will know about it, and it gives the technology a kind of validation, an Apple seal of approval, for the people who are slower to look at new technologies.

It also may mean that Apple will evangelize RSS to publications that haven’t yet adopted it. Which is great: it’s not something we have much time for, and when CNN hears from Apple it carries a bit more weight than when they hear from Ranchero Software.

This could trigger a shake-out in the Mac OS X newsreaders market. There are a dozen or so readers right now, but by this time next year there may be Safari and just a few others. (NetNewsWire will be one of them.)



So I don’t feel as we’ve been Sherlocked. But it does look to me as if the Konfabulator folks might have something to say about Dashboard.

NetNewsWire 1.0.2 progress

NetNewsWire 1.0.2 progress 03/19/2003 10:44 PM
In case you’re curious on how NetNewsWire 1.0.2 development is going...

It’s a four-step process:

1. Move low-level, relatively bug-free code into separate frameworks. The RSS parser, for instance, goes into a framework. (The main reason is that it makes code maintenance and testing easier, and it makes it so I can re-use this code easily in other software.)

2. Fix a bunch of small quick-hit bugs. Things like bugs with date display and keyboard shortcuts. A particular crashing bug in the weblog editor. That kind of thing.

3. Fix—or at least dramatically improve—performance and memory issues when one has lots of subscriptions and lots of unread headlines.

4. Add a few new features—mostly weblog editing features such as supporting more Radio and Movable Type options. (Some other things too.)

I gave myself a week to do step 1—but it’s already finished. I did it over the weekend. It was totally fun, by the way. If you’re a Cocoa developer, but you’ve shied away from building frameworks, you should know that it’s a piece of cake.

So now I’m in the middle of step 2, doing a bunch of quick-hit bug fixes. This is one of my favorite things to do, because it’s all about polish, getting the details right. With some good hours of brain-time you can knock off bugs by the anthill.

Later this week I’ll move on to performance and memory issues, then on to adding new features probably next week. Then I’ll release the first beta of 1.0.2.

NetNewsWire and Jaguar

NetNewsWire and Jaguar 07/03/2004 06:04 PM

To be clear, in my previous post I’m thinking out loud about requiring Panther for NetNewsWire 2.0.

It’s just thinking, though. No decision has been made, I’m just bringing up the topic.

But if you’re a NetNewsWire user who uses Jaguar, I’d especially love to hear what you think. (And I’d like to know why you’re still on Jaguar. I’m sure there are good reasons I haven’t thought of.)

NetNewsWire 2.0 will run on Jaguar

NetNewsWire 2.0 will run on Jaguar 07/05/2004 07:16 PM

After listening to all the feedback (here and elsewhere) on this issue, we’ve decided to support Jaguar in NetNewsWire 2.0.

Jaguar was the first really good OS X release, and we’d support it forever if we could, but some day we’ll have to drop it. Not yet, though.

In case you’re curious, here’s why we decided to continue to support Jaguar:

1. We can provide the Panther-only features we want to provide without dropping Jaguar support.

The main thing is searching. SearchKit is part of Panther but not part of Jaguar, so Jaguar users just won’t get this feature, but Panther users will.

2. It would be more work at this point to switch over to Panther-only than to stick with Jaguar compatibility.

To switch over to using things like Cocoa bindings—which make our life easier but don’t provide new features to users—would mean more work. At some point, yes, we’ll make the switch, but only when there are other compelling reasons to drop Jaguar support.

Anyway, that’s the scoop.

Thanks for all the feedback!

AppleScripting NetNewsWire

AppleScripting NetNewsWire 03/13/2003 10:16 AM
A screenshot of AppleScripting NetNewsWire from Brent Simmons. This rocks my world. For those without the joy of Mac in...

NetNewsWire 2.0 Status

NetNewsWire 2.0 Status 08/19/2004 08:47 PM
So—where’s NetNewsWire 2.0?

Well, we’re working quite hard on it—which is why I haven’t been doing much posting, and why if you’ve sent me email I may not have replied.

It’s not ready for a public beta yet. The main new features are all in place. What remains is fixing bugs, adding a couple small features, updating the Help, adding polish, basically just taking care of all the many little details.

In other words, we’re in the final sprint. The to-do list is down to 95 items.

(If you’d like to help test, and you have a NetNewsWire license, just send me email. Bravery is required, though, because it does still have bugs. Most of the 95 items on the to-do list are bugs to fix.)

What remains to do

Only a few of the remaining items are big things like updating the Help book. Most are small, it’s just that there are many of them. To give you a flavor...

- A smart list will cause a crash if you unsubscribe from a feed and the smart list includes headlines from that feed.

- The Atom feed parser doesn’t support base64 encoding.

- The order of columns in the headlines table is not remembered between runs.

- The 32K limit to the HTML differences feature should be removed.

- Etc.

Each of the above—and most of the rest of the list—are small, easy-to-fix items.

This, luckily for me, is my favorite part of software development. I enjoy fixing bugs much more than I enjoy adding big new features, probably because I can fix a bunch of bugs in a few hours. It’s like eating chocolates throughout the day instead of eating one big steak once a week.

That’s not to say that there aren’t lots of big new features in 2.0. There are. What we’re doing right now is making sure that it’s not just ambitious but good.

(A reminder, in case you missed it: NetNewsWire 2.0 will be a free upgrade for everyone who has bought or will buy NetNewsWire 1.x.)

Random discussion of one small part of one feature

Here’s what tabs ended up looking like.



How many different ways can tabs be done? You’d be surprised. We tried just about every configuration.

I really wanted the favicons because they perform a usability function: the icons make it easier to find the tab you’re looking for. It’s not just for looks. (We’re Mac users, right? We like icons.)

But the close button needs to be on the left since that’s where it is in Safari, and since close buttons appear in the upper left of Aqua windows. (When we tried putting them on the right, testers could just not get the hang of it.)

We could have put them together—close button, favicon, then title—but that looked very jumbled.

Another option, which had its supporters, was to combine them. The favicons would become close buttons on mouseover. Slick, yes, but at the cost of explicitness. If you didn’t mouseover, you didn’t know there were close buttons.

Another option was to do it like Firefox. In Firefox, tabs have favicons on the left, and there’s just one close button to the right of all the tabs. (But when we tried it, the feedback was almost completely negative, even though many NetNewsWire testers use Firefox. I personally liked this approach, but that’s just me.)

It’s funny, though, because the Firefox style had a unique selling point: it meant you could close an “overflow” tab by clicking a close button. Try it in Safari—open a bunch of tabs so that you get the little tabs menu widget on the right. Select one of the tabs from that menu. Is there something you can click to close that tab? No, you have to use the Close Tab command. With Firefox you can still click the close button.

In the end we went with the configuration pictured above, and we decided to make it possible to turn off the favicons, since it became one of those 50-50 things: some people really wanted them, but other people really preferred a cleaner look.

All of the above is just to say that software development is about trade-offs, and this is a textbook case because the trade-offs are obvious and there is no one best way to do it.



By the way, I’ll be doing a session called “Using WebKit: User Interface Challenges” at O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Conference this October. I probably won’t talk about the specifics of tabs design—it will be at a higher, more conceptual level.

NetNewsWire 1.0 Released

NetNewsWire 1.0 Released 03/13/2003 10:15 AM
NetNewsWire 1.0 has been released with a $29.95 introductory price.... NNW is without doubt the best blogger tool on the...

NetNewsWire 1.0.1fc1

NetNewsWire 1.0.1fc1 03/12/2003 08:08 PM
NetNewsWire 1.0.1fc1 fixes a weblog editor bug with saving drafts and includes a couple other minor changes.

See the cha nge notes for the whole scoop.

This is a final candidate release. We’re looking for deal-stopper bugs, bugs bad enough to prevent this from being released as 1.0.1.

Once 1.0.1 is released, we’ll go back to fixing bugs—and also adding new features, such as supporting more Movable Type options, allowing Radio users to specify that a post shouldn’t go on a home page, and so on.

NetNewsWire and Keynote

NetNewsWire and Keynote 03/19/2003 10:44 PM
An interesting feature request for NetNewsWire appeared on Tom Bridge’s weblog today—creating Keynote presentations from RSS feeds.

Tom Bridge writes: “Imagine for just a moment with me. You wake up, and on the way to the shower flip open your powerbook, fire up NetNewsWire and go get clean. When you've come back, NNW has created a Keynote presentation for you.”

It’s a good idea!

But... I have a few things to do first—fixing some bugs, adding new features to the weblog editor—before I could work on this. It will be a few weeks before I can do much with this idea.

Mac OS X security bug and NetNewsWire

Mac OS X security bug and NetNewsWire 05/19/2004 05:48 PM
Recently a security bug was reported in Safari. Clicking on certain URLs could cause a script to run on your machine.

Sylvain Carle alerted us to the fact that this security bug is not really a Safari bug, it’s a bug in WebKit.

WebKit is Safari’s rendering system, provided by Apple as part of OS X, which other applications use too—including NetNewsWire.

NetNewsWire uses WebKit to display feed descriptions, so NetNewsWire (and other WebKit-using applications) may be vulnerable to this bug.

We certainly expect that Apple will fix the bug with a security update, and that should solve the problem. In the meantime we’re looking at the possibility of fixing it just for NetNewsWire, in case Apple doesn’t come through with a fix.

For reference: here’s the report on the bug, and here’s a CNET article about it, which states that Apple is aware of the issue.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brent@ranchero.com.

NetNewsWire 2.0 progress report

NetNewsWire 2.0 progress report 06/25/2004 04:59 PM

We had hoped to ship NetNewsWire 2.0 before WWDC—or at least have a public beta released. But, well, I was optimistic. It looks like it will have to wait until July.

Just so you know, here’s where it’s at...

The major new features are all in testing, except for synching, which I’ve been concentrating on this week. As soon as synching is in testing—either this week or right after WWDC—then all that remains is adding a couple small features, fixing bugs, and adding polish.

In other words, we’re just about to turn the corner and enter the home stretch.

We have a large group of testers, and they’ve been doing a great job of banging on things. Stability is job #1, and it appears to be at least as stable as 1.0.8, if not more so. Performance is also important—some of our testers have huge subscription lists that we’ve been testing with, and we’ve done a bunch of work to make NetNewsWire faster.

(Stability and performance are ongoing jobs, of course, and we’ll continue to work on them after 2.0 ships. Every app could be faster and more stable.)

Dilemma

My dilemma is: when should we release a public beta?

On one hand I want the public beta to be highly polished, so that people get a good impression of the app.

But on the other hand I’m eager to have you get a chance to use all the new features, even if they’re not quite perfect yet.



As an example of what I mean, look at the tabs above. Note how the close button is on the right side. This is an example of the many little details that need to be cleared up before shipping the final version. (Should the close buttons be on the left, a la Safari? But then should the favicon move to the right? Should it be a pref? Or...?)

With a closed testing program, everybody has a stake in improving the app. With a public beta, lots of people evaluate it as if it’s a finished, shipping app—which isn’t fair to the software, but they do it anyway.

So I’m torn between releasing the public beta early, before it’s very polished yet, and releasing it later, when it’s very close to being the final, shipping version.

What do you think? Would it be dumb to release the public beta sooner rather than later, or should I just go for it, release it at the soonest possible date?

A few facts

I’ve mentioned these things before, but I figured I’d repeat them since they’ve scrolled off my weblog...

NetNewsWire 2.0 will be a free upgrade. Everybody who bought (or will buy) 1.x will get all 2.x updates for free.

And here’s a partial list of the new features in 2.0:

Searching
Flagged items
Sample style sheets
Embedded browsing
Smart lists (like smart playlists in iTunes)
Scripted feeds
Search engine feeds
Activity window
Errors window
Synching
Support for external weblog editors
Importing/exporting OPML with groups
Atom feed support
Persistence
Per-feed refresh settings
Suspended feeds

"netnewswire 2.0 public beta!"

"netnewswire 2.0 public beta!" 09/23/2004 03:38 PM

Grok Description matches for NetNewsWire 1.0.7
GrokA matches for NetNewsWire 1.0.7

NetNewsWire 1.0.7

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