Toxic Software: “iCalToRSS is a set of Python scripts I wrote for retrieving iCal events and TODO items and displaying them as RSS newsfeeds inside NetNewsWire 2.”

DrunkenBlog interviews Christopher Forsythe, Growl developer. “At first glance, it might be easy to dismiss Growl as superfluous eye-candy. However, once you spend a bit of time with it, you realize what it’s trying to do and just how much it can help you.”

Two weblog editor authors have released Flickr clients. Fraser Speirs’ FlickrExport is an iPhoto plugin that “provides a direct export interface to Flickr.com.” Adriaan Tijsseling’s 1001 “not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded.”

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: “Good news for anyone who has ever wished Cocoal.icio.us did X or had Y: now you have the power to make your dreams come true (well, your software-related ones anyway). You heard me right: I finally made good on my promise to clean up the Cocoal.icio.us project and open source the code.”

powerbook.blogger.de posted a style sheet based on the Ollicle style sheet posted the other day.

Tim Brayshaw: “If you’re looking for a high-falootin’ rootin’-tootin’ fancy-dancy piece of eye-candy, this isn’t it. It’s just a simple plain stylesheet designed for everyday reading.”

Eric Meyer: “Looking to spruce up the article display in NetNewsWire 2?”

Eric’s styles (15 Petals, NNW Classic Default, and Popper) are included in NetNewsWire 2.0b6—but he’s also made them available via the web.

Oliver Boermans: “I set out to create a design for everyday reading, one that sits back and lets the text do the talking.”

Congratulations to the winners of the latest OS X Innovators contest!

Patrick Quinn-Graham: “What with everybody making their own style for NetNewsWire I decided to make my own. It’s nothing revolutionary, borrows from others, but with a colour scheme matching that (basically) of my own site. So nice dark background.”

Michael Dupuis: “At first blush, you’d look at these two sets of applications and determine that ‘Aqua apps run to the window edges, and Metal apps have borders.’ But herein lies one of the many inconsistencies. While this is true in general, Apple’s Safari (Metal) throws this paradigm out the window and runs its elements to the window edges. DiskUtility however uses the default Aqua theme and has borders.”

Clint Ecker posted a new script that “uses AppleScript to interface with NetNewsWire 2.0 and extract RSS enclosures, downloads them to disk, and then uses AppleScript to add the PodCasts into a playlist in iTunes.”

randomchaos: “today i’m releasing netmuswire, an applescript that combines netnewswire, ical, and itunes into a scheduled mp3 aggregator. netnewswire does the aggregating, ical does the download scheduling, and itunes does the playing. there’s an installer that sets everything up to run automatically, but it’s easy to adjust if you don’t like the default schedule—just change the ical event times.”

James Duncan Davidson: “After a bit of work here and there, UnitKit 1.1 goes live today.”

Harold Bakker: “With the coming of the NNW2 betas I’ve finally created a really comprehensive stylesheet. It’s called Bluish as it’s, well, blueish.”

Daring Fireball: Does This Brushed Metal Stuff Really Even Matter?: “I’ve been thinking about brushed metal windows and Apple’s inconsistent use thereof at least since Panther shipped a year ago. So, why wait until now to write about it? Well, because I just wasn’t sure it actually mattered.”

We’ve posted MarsEdit 1.0b4—here are the change notes.

The goal of this release was to fix a couple bugs that get reported just about every day: 1) the bug with applying default settings when you choose post-to-weblog in another app, and 2) sending trackbacks.

We recognize that lots of folks are eager for Markdown preview support and for customizing the list of sites to ping. We still plan to do both for 1.0, but they’re not in this beta.

Full and Lite versions of NetNewsWire 2.0b6 have been posted to the beta page.

This build fixes some high-priority bugs—including a demo-expiration bug, crashing bugs, and a memory-use bug—and it makes the Find panel work. A bunch of smaller changes were made too, including new style sheets, a new feature for dock menu users, and new feeds in the Sites Drawer.

Read the change notes to see everything that’s changed since the previous beta.

If a feature you’re waiting for isn’t there yet, or if a bug you reported hasn’t been fixed, worry not—we’re still at work. There will be more betas.

If you’re using a demo version of NetNewsWire, and you think it’s anywhere near expiring—don’t quit the program. There is a bug in the beta where if you quit, then launch it after it’s expired, you could lose your flagged items and read/unread status.

We’re going to release a new beta that fixes this bug tomorrow. In the meantime, please accept our apologies.

You can tell when your demo expires by choosing License... from the NetNewsWire menu.

Martin Pittenauer: “I thought: ‘There should be an easy way to download RSS enclosures automatically using NetNewsWire.’ So I grabbed a bit of code from Brent’s page on enclosures and hacked a small perl script I can run via cron, that looks at a group in NetNewsWire, downloads the according enclosures and adds them to an iTunes playlist...”

Daring Fireball: “If your application is a professional production tool, and your company headquarters are at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino CA, you may use the special Pro theme to provide a special appearance for your application.”

John has a special knack for walking right into spiders nests.

Apple has posted a Tiger developer overview: “The next version of Apple’s powerful UNIX-based operating system, Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, will be the most important release for developers since Mac OS X was first released in 2001.”

Derrick Story: “Over the past few weeks, I’ve been pointing out some of the interesting highlights and unusual events that I think make the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference (Oct. 25-28 in Santa Clara, Calif.) a ‘must-see’ event... here’s a fly-by for your surveying pleasure.”

DrunkenBlog: RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable: “I’m a big fan of RSS, and while ago I decided I wanted to do one of my chats with the author behind one of the RSS aggregators for Mac OS X, and hit a conundrum: there were too many cool apps to choose from.”

It’s a chat with the authors of NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsMac, PulpFiction, and Shrook.

Gus Mueller: “I think VoodooPad 2 is ready for some public testing at this point. I’ve been using it for months without any problems, and I’ve had a great group of testers that have pointed out the big flaws which have since then been fixed.”

Daring Fireball: “But the deeper argument against the brushed metal (a.k.a. textured) theme is simply one of consistency. A large part of the Mac’s historical usability advantage is that Mac applications all look and feel the same.”

P@ Sunglasses: Gmail adds Atom feeds: “From Steve Rubel I learnt that Gmail added an atom feed to read the emails from your Gmail account in a RSS aggregator... Your RSS aggregator must support https and basic auth.”

Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes: NNW Subscription to iPod Contacts v1.6: “This script will copy the news items of the selected Subscription in NetNewsWire to the ‘Contacts’ folder of iPod in vCard format for portable reading.”

MacDevCenter.com: An Introduction to RubyCocoa, Part 2: “In today’s conclusion he gets into the actual code... and if you’re following along, you’ll end up with a functioning application.”

Alex King updated his NetNewsWire-to-Tasks script: “This version works with the new tabbed browsing feature in NetNewsWire 2. If a browser tab is the current tab, it uses that URL and page title, otherwise it uses the selected news item as it did previously.”

Matthew Maber created a Spotlight-like style for NetNewsWire. Very cool.

inessential.com: As you might imagine, we’ve been getting lots of feature requests and bug reports for MarsEdit. Here are some of the main things we’ve been hearing from people—and what the plan is.”

Kevin Sheridan posted some scripts that make it so you can blog using ecto, ecto 2, and MarsEdit from AquaMinds NoteTaker: “The mere fact you’re visiting this site means I know what you’re thinking: How does NoteTaker get along with Ecto2 and MarsEdit? Are you sitting down? Good.”

Derik DeLong posted a style sheet for NetNewsWire: “I made my own (which was meant to be a fall styled theme, but ended up looking more like a Southwestern theme).”

Eric Blair posted a script which creates a new MarsEdit post from the frontmost BBEdit window.

MacDevCenter.com: An Introduction to RubyCocoa, Part 1: “RubyCocoa is a framework that provides a bridge between the Ruby programming language and the Cocoa framework of the Mac OS X operating system. This framework allows you to create Mac OS X native, Cocoa-based applications using Ruby.”

The PHP Function Index for Mac OS X “is a simple browser to quickly look up any PHP function. Its search offers realtime-filtering of the function list and its AppleScript interface lets you look up functions easily from within your favorite editor (like BBEdit or any other scriptable app).”

inessential.com: MarsEdit user interface notes: “In order to improve both NetNewsWire and the weblog editor, we needed to induce mitosis.”

MacOSXHints: Post to a Del.icio.us account from NetNewsWire: “Since I do most of my reading in NetNewsWire what I really wanted was the ability to grab headlines while reading in NNW and post them to my del.icio.us account. I created the following AppleScript to do just that.”

Also note that you can set the very cool Cocoal.icio.us as your weblog editor and post to del.icio.us that way.

PreFab Software: PreFab UI Browser helps you “explore, control and monitor the user interface of most Mac OS X applications. It lets you navigate the user interface hierarchy then generate useful AppleScript statements with a single click.”

Bryan Bell posted SpaceShipOne desktop pictures. Very cool.

About This Particular Macintosh continues its series on outliners with a look at Tinderbox. “I hope this column does the job of introducing Tinderbox with little pain, because though it clearly is not for everyone it may be just what you are looking for.”