Top tips from Rob Griffiths of the Mac OS X Hints website.

The latest beta of UserCreations Spring includes a new feature, Canvas to Canvas Trading.

MacDevCenter on DNS and on using Mac OS X’s Network Utility app.

The O’Reilly folks have released Cocoa in a Nutshell, by Michael Beam and James Duncan Davidson. Cool. A Cocoa reference book has been missing.

Read it to Me “creates a playlist of MP3 files in iTunes from your unread items in NetNewsWire using Apple’s Text-to-Speech that you can sync to your iPod.”

In other words—you can listen to news from NetNewsWire on your iPod. Very cool!

O’Reilly: “If your application hasn’t been written to take full advantage of multithreading, it will not run any faster on two processors than on one. If your code includes any number crunching, you probably should consider how it could be restructured to take full advantage of that second processor, which will otherwise lie dormant, twiddling its thumbs while processor uno works its behind off.”

Derrick Story: “The goal here is to discover and share the process that a successful Mac developer uses to take a glint of an idea full term to its full potential.”

waferbaby interviews John Gruber, who says things like “no one claims you’re in a ‘cult’ if you prefer hamburgers from friday’s over those from mcdonald’s” and “the most popular thing to do on the web is to read.”

Thanks to Lauri Kieksi for the review in Macsanomat.com, the news service of the Finnish Macintosh User Group. NetNewsWire receives 4.5 out of 5 points in this review, written in Finnish.

Lauri says he's waiting for NetNewsWire to feature a full HTML view—this is also high on our priority list as soon as WebKit, Safari’s HTML renderer for Cocoa developers, is released.

This new site is a directory of Mac applications. From the website: “No ratings, no user-reviews, just killer apps.”

Get it while it’s hot! See the change notes for details on what’s new since 1.0.2.

Brent talks about Cocoa and the Mac software market. And admits his love of popcorn.

MacMerc’s Jon Gales covers an often-overlooked feature of Mac OS X, the Services menu, in this week’s Power User Monday. (NetNewsWire is used as an example in this article. Thanks for the mention!)

kuro5hin: “Our decades of trying to use [the construction analogy] have not taken us very far considering the incredibly bright minds that have been working on it. Instead we have to explicitly recognize the true attributes of software creation: its incredible flexibility, its odd economics, and the remarkable human talents required to create it.”

Webmonkey: “RSS gained traction among small developers years ago, because it’s easy to code and simple to share. Today, RSS is gaining momentum with big commercial sites because the technology draws in a smart and growing audience.”

This page lists a bunch of ideas we’re thinking about for future releases of NetNewsWire.

Tim O’Reilly: “Unlike applications from the previous paradigm, web applications are not released in one to three year cycles. They are updated every day, sometimes every hour. Rather than being finished paintings, they are sketches.”

This release fixes a bug where sometimes the vertical scrollbar wouldn’t appear in the Configure window.

This is the first beta release of NetNewsWire Lite in a couple months. This version includes all the relevant bug fixes from the recent release of the full version of NetNewsWire. See the change notes for details.

One important thing to note: this release requires OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) or better. We will continue to make the last pre-Jaguar-friendly release available, even after NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3 ships, for people who haven’t upgraded to Jaguar yet.

Michael Beam has returned to the web with a column on programming with sockets and NSFileHandle.

We posted on inessential.com a couple movies that show how to subscribe to a site in NetNewsWire via drag-and-drop and via the Services menu.

Stepwise reviews various Cocoa networking frameworks. “With network capabilities required by so many applications, Cocoa developers often wonder why Apple doesn’t provide a complete Objective-C solution for network programming... Fortunately, there are many third-party open-source solutions available.”

This new release of TigerLaunch fixes a bug where user-added folders wouldn’t always have their apps added to the Apps menu when TigerLaunch starts up.

Emmanuel Décarie: “I made a little cgi script in Perl to display part of my Apache log in NetNewsWire.”

There are three main changes in 1.0.2 (since 1.0.1): the news reader is faster, lots of bugs were fixed, and there are new weblog editor features for Movable Type and Radio UserLand users.

Thanks to everyone who helped with bug reports, feature requests, and other feedback!

Ben Trott proposes a profile of RSS for weblogs. This is a good and needed thing.

This final candidate release includes no code changes since the previous beta. It updates the Help book and the Sites Drawer.

John Gruber continues the discussion about click-through. It’s a fascinating topic (if you’re into user interface).

In NetNewsWire, click-through for toolbar buttons is enabled by default—but we do now (in recent betas) provide a preference for disabling toolbar button click-through. If nothing else, this provides an easy way to test in the same app the different behaviors.

This beta fixes a few weblog editor bugs, particularly bugs with editing Blosxom sites. See the change notes.

This should be the last beta to include any code changes. Unless deal-stopper bugs are found, the next release will be 1.0.2fc1, which will include updates to the Sites Drawer and updated documentation, but no more code changes.

This beta fixes one of the most annoying bugs in NetNewsWire—where headlines that are the same in multiple feeds (as with the BBC feeds, for instance) would mess up various unread counts. See the change notes for more info.

Safari developer Dave Hyatt writes about the problem with native widgets in web browsers. Posts like this are so cool—it’s fun to read other developers describe the problems they face.

Apple: “A seasoned UNIX developer recognizes that no matter how similar two UNIX-based operating systems are, there are always details that sets one apart from another.” This article goes over some of those details.

Tim Bray on dynamic languages: “They’re saying more or less the same thing: the safety and robustness that strong typing bought us is accomplished way more effectively by good modern testing practices, and given that strong typing is a serious pain in the ass, maybe we’re going all going to end up using dynamically-typed languages like Python.”

Cocoa Poker is like video poker in Las Vegas, only it’s pretend money. We’re going to download it and give it a try.

This beta fixes a few miscellaneous bugs: see the change notes for details. We’re in the last stages of shipping 1.0.2, just fixing bugs and taking care of all the details. Look for a release probably sometime next week.

O’Reilly begins its second Mac OS X Innovators contest today. Good luck to all who enter!

A beta a day keeps the doctor away. This beta fixes a crashing bug in the Notepad and improves the layout of several of the Preferences panels. See the change notes for details.

This beta fixes a couple of Movable Type weblog editing bugs: you can now specify default for various options, and Movable Type options are saved when you save as a draft. See the change notes for details.

Andrew Stone on moving Cocoa code into loadable bundles.

Paul Graham compares people who write software to painters—they both make things.

This beta fixes the most common newsreader crash, the updateUnreadCount crash—at least, testing so far indicates that this is true. It may not entirely be fixed, so sending us crash logs is always a good idea. More details are on the change notes.

This beta fixes a couple bugs with refreshing feeds and includes some small user interface enhancements. See the change notes for details.

This release fixes a few bugs. Also, the Sites Drawer was updated—and it has a new feature, a Latest Additions folder. See the change notes for more details on this release.

This beta fixes some news reader bugs. (There are more bugs to fix, of course.) See the change notes for details.

John Gruber compares iTunes and Safari, and shows where Safari could learn a few things.

The first 1.0.2 beta of NetNewsWire includes lots of little bug fixes, performance enhancements, and new features for the weblog editor—including support for Radio not-on-home-page posting and several Movable Type options. See the change notes for details.

But remember—it’s a beta. There are bugs.

Rick Sutcliffe writes, “The advent of WebLog creation tools, the increasing prominence of XML, and the market appearance of programs such as NetNewsWire make news feeds a personal and individual experience both in the reading and in the writing. Look for a proliferation of sites offering blogs or feeds as this catches on. Ranchero has a big winner here.”

Snowmint Creative Solutions has released an open source 2-D graph view for Cocoa. Looks pretty good from the screen shot.

The new Mac Developer Directory is a place where developers can sign up so people looking for developers can find them.