NetNewsWire Lite 2.0b37 Change Notes
4 April 2005
This page lists changes to NetNewsWire Lite since 2.0b23.
(You can download the current beta from the NetNewsWire beta page.)
Note
All features of the final 2.0 version are included in this beta.
What remains to do before shipping 2.0 is fixing more bugs, adding polish, and updating the documentation and website.
Backups
You should make backups of your NetNewsWire data. (Even once 2.0 has shipped, making backups is a good idea. It’s always a good idea—for other data too, not just for NetNewsWire.)
The two things to back up are your preferences and data folder:
- Preferences:
~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist - Data folder:
~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/
Highlights of this release
- Performance boosts and crash fixes.
- RSS parser fixes.
- Fewer “reruns.”
- And many more bug fixes and enhancements.
Changes since 2.0b23
Performance
Feed downloading performance
A number of performance optimizations were done, particularly while refreshing feeds. (For instance, it was recounting the overall unread count more often than necessary. It was updating the dock badge sometimes whether or not the unread count changed. A bunch of little things like that that add up.)
Mark all as read performance
Marking all as read appears faster now because the database accesses have been moved to a separate thread, so it happens in the background.
Crashing bugs
Several crashing bugs were fixed, most notably a crash in the feed downloader.
Password-protected feeds and proxy authentication
Fixed a bug where passwords retrieved from the keychain could have garbage characters added to them, resulting in authentication failures.
Fixed a memory leak where password data would sometimes be leaked after getting it from the keychain.
Description display
A bug introduced in a previous beta that seemed to affect mostly comics feeds was fixed. The symptom was that the comic wouldn’t display—now it will. Example: http://www.heterosapiens.com/~crschmidt/luann.xml
If a link inside a description goes to another place inside the description, the description scrolls. (Instead of opening a new tab.) In other words, links like "#foo" now work correctly.
Headlines display
News item titles have their entities double-decoded in the headlines table. This works around a bug in feeds like the New York Times Most Emailed Articles feed http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/pop_top.xml where you would see entities such as ' in the headlines table.
Fixed a bug that prevented some cases of < and > from appearing in titles—text might get stripped out. (As in this feed: http://feeds.aps.org/rss/recent/prd.xml) NetNewsWire still strips some common HTML that appears in titles in RSS feeds (such as <i> and similar) but leaves intact other cases where < and > appear. (Note: HTML is not supposed to appear in titles in RSS feeds, but some feeds do it anyway. Sigh.)
Feed auto-discovery and rdf
Now finds feeds with a link like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" title="French Girl in London frenchgirl le blog de Boaglio RSS" href="http://frenchgirl.over-blog.com/index.rdf"/> Previously it didn’t find application/rdf+xml links.
RSS parser
Note: RSS parser changes apply to future items, but not to already-parsed items.
Some comics RSS feeds incorrectly include unescaped HTML in their description—which NetNewsWire now handles. Example: http://rss.slightlyinsane.com/?comic=dilbert (Actually, some other feeds do this too, but we’ve mostly seen it with comics feeds lately.)
NetNewsWire will now read Village Voice feeds even though they begin with <?php xml version="1.0"?>. Example feeds: http://www.villagevoice.com/most_recent_rss.php and http://www.villagevoice.com/most_popular_rss.php
The RSS parser now supports multiple categories. They appear as comma-delimited lists in the headlines and description panes.
Now parses the dates in http://meyerweb.com/eric/redesignwatch/rss20.xml which look like 09 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000.
Fixed a bug with hex entities in the RSS parser. Now “Boy on a Stick and Slither” works: http://interglacial.com/rss/boy_on_a_stick_and_slither.rss
Worked around a bug in http://www.medicinenet.com/rss/dailyhealth.xml so that links work.
Atom parser
Fixed a bug where sometimes updated items in Atom feeds wouldn’t display the new version.
NetNewsWire no longer refuses to parse Atom feeds with Shift_JIS encoding. (It used to be that Shift-JIS reliably made the XML parser crash, but it doesn’t appear to be the case any more.) For instance, the following feed now works: http://pixelscribbles.com/journal/rss/atom.xml
News items and reruns
Don’t mark as unread unless description changes
Changed a processing rule to make “reruns”—seemingly duplicate items that appear in the same feed—much less likely. If a news item has changed—but the description and/or summary is/are still the same—it won’t be marked as unread.
Some feeds change just the link or whatever, so it makes it look like an old item has gotten marked as unread. (Even though, in reality, the item has in fact been updated. They aren’t really duplicate items, it just seems that way.)
This change only works for Atom feeds and RSS feeds that use guids. Remember to bug your favorite webmasters to use guids or use Atom.
Don’t mark as unread unless description changes length
Another change makes reruns even less likely: if the description changes, but it’s within a dozen characters of the length of the existing description, it’s not marked as read. (The descriptions are compared after stripping HTML and collapsing whitespace).
The idea is that you won’t be bothered by insignificant changes. Barring sophisticated semantic analysis, checking the length is pretty reasonable.
Here’s a scenario: say you’re subscribed to a feed for some forum somewhere. In each news item is the number of replies to that item. The news item description thus changes every time there’s a new reply to that item. It’s annoying to have that item marked as unread. This way it’s not marked as unread.
Here’s the thing: if NetNewsWire considers any change to be a significant update, then people perceive it as a bug. It’s probably the single most common bug report, even though it’s very rarely a bug. (It’s almost always a real change of some kind in the feed.)
You can change the number from a dozen to something else via the standard command-line defaults write command. The key is significantChangeInLength. (Like other hidden prefs, make the change when NetNewsWire is not running.)
Note: again, none of the above applies to RSS feeds without guids. It only works for Atom feeds and RSS feeds with guids. (Ranchero to world: please use guids! Or Atom!)
Misc. news item fixes
Links with %26
Fixed the bug that messed up URLs with %26 in them. This made it so some links (most commonly at Fark) didn’t work. This bug will take some time to work it’s way through your system. Already-parsed news items won’t get the fix, but new items will.
Groups and dupes
Fixed a bug that causes duplicate items in groups (this may have only affected groups with sub-groups).
Subscriptions outline
Drag and drop
There was a drag-and-drop bug with links: you couldn’t drop a link onto a group and have the feed appear inside the group. It would appear at the same level as the group. Fixed.
Sort by last update
Added a new sort order for the subscriptions list: sort by last update date. It uses the most recent date for the most recent item to determine the date to sort on. .
New-items subscription
The contextual menu no longer has an errant separator item at the top.
If you unsubscribe from this subscription via the Unsubscribe command or Delete key, it’s handled specially now (as it’s supposed to be) rather than just unsubscribed-from like other feeds.
If you have only this subscription selected, the Unsubscribe command in the menu is disabled. (Even though it now would work fine. It’s just a way of indicating that this subscription is special and it’s best to use the menu command.)
Sites Drawer update
The Sites Drawer was updated with more new feeds and a new Photography category. See the New in 2.0 category to see everything that has been added since the release of 1.0.8.
Info window
Headers are now bold.
Preferences window glitch
If you click on the toolbar icon for the pane that’s currently showing, it used to be that the contents of the window would flash. Fixed.
Subscribing
Feed: URLs and subscribing
If you subscribe to a feed: URL—manually or via drag-and-drop—it should work fine now. (If there’s a feed: URL on the clipboard, it even translates it to an http URL before pasting it into the subscribe sheet.)
Redirects bug fix
In some cases, subscribing to a feed that did a redirect would cause the subscribe to fail. Fixed. For example, you can subscribe to http://jim.roepcke.com/hbwt_headlines.rss which redirects to http://jim.roepcke.com/index/rss
Already-subscribed sheet
When you try to add a new subscription, but you’re already subscribed, an error sheet is supposed to appear to let you know. But sometimes it wouldn’t appear because the subscribe sheet was still animating itself away. So now the error sheet waits a little to give the subscribe sheet a chance to get away, thereby ensuring that it will display.
Main menu
All the menu commands in the menu are now disabled when the main window is not open.
Dock icon opens main window
If you click on the dock icon, the main window will open even if other windows are already open. (Previously it would open only if no other windows were open.)
Jaguar
Fixed a bug that prevented file-open and file-choose sheets from appearing in Jaguar.
Resources
The new Resources page is linked-to in the menu: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/resources/
It has pages and feeds for tips, scripts, styles, etc.
(The pages—the entire NetNewsWire website, in fact—are still under construction for the 2.0 release. But these URLs are stable and usable.)
Help book
The help book was updated with new pages. Some older pages were updated to reflect recent changes. (To open it, choose .)
