Ranchero Software: NetNewsWire Change Notes

NetNewsWire Change Notes

This page lists changes to the full version of NetNewsWire since the release of NetNewsWire 1.0.

In the Help book, fixed references to the View menu, since the View menu has been removed.

Fixed a weblog editor bug where saving as a draft could fail in a newly-created weblog.
In the Info window for subscriptions, changed the name of the Update button to Apply. This makes more sense: it means to apply the changes. Update could be confused with updating the feed, as in reading it from the web.
When you enter a serial number into the License dialog and click OK, a dialog appears thanking you. Before there was no confirmation or thanks.
Added a couple dozen sites to the Sites Drawer.

When posting to Movable Type sites, the weblog editor makes sure a primary category is set if any categories at all are set. This is one half of fixing the "Can’t call method 'id' on an undefined value at lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm" bug.
Fixed a crash-at-startup bug that would happen if you had a feed with an empty RSS URL.
Another crashing bug fixed: a change in the previous beta made it so that feeds that lack an enclosing rss or rdf tag could crash NetNewsWire. Now they no longer crash—and they’ll be parsed normally, despite being weird. Example feed (at least at this writing): http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/newscat73.xml
Moved various show-window commands from the View menu to the Window menu. Reason: consistency with other applications. These commands are also now “toggle” commands: they say Show Xxx and Hide Xxx depending on whether the window is visible.
Also moved the Show Notepad command from the Notepad menu to the Window menu.
The Show Main Window command now has a keyboard shortcut: cmd-shift-N.
Removed the View menu, since all it had left were customize toolbar commands. That’s not enough to justify having a View menu, especially since you can ctrl-click to customize the toolbar.

New items in aggregate views (folders and new headlines views) appear at the top again. The change made in the previous beta has been reversed.
During updates, the current selection in aggregative views should be less jumpy.
A bug with reading Motley Fool’s RSS feed was fixed.
Replaced Salon.com with SpaceToday.net in the list of default subscriptions for new users.

Fixed a hanging bug where if a Blosxom weblog didn’t have a folder set for it then the system would hang when opening the weblog editor window.
Fixed a bug getting categories from Radio weblogs. (If you’re not getting categories for your weblog, try clicking the Refresh button in the weblog editor.)
Made the XML-RPC code forgiving of unencoded ampersands. There should be fewer parse errors.
Made the RSS parser for forgiving of unencoded ampersands, which should result in less failed feeds.
Eliminated that bogus error message about not finding a feed where an /index.xml is added to the end of the URL. (The bug was that the feed was invalid, so NetNewsWire tried as a last-ditch attempt to find a feed at [url]/index.xml, but then it didn’t fix the URL before reporting the error.)
Be more forgiving when opening a URL in the browser—replace any spaces in the URL with %20. (Sometimes people accidentally have spaces in their URLs.)
Did a special case for BoingBoing’s feed so the Link Discuss links don’t run together.
In aggregated views (folders and new headlines views), new items now go at the end, which prevents weird selection-hopping bugs.

Lots of under-the-hood changes to the new XML-RPC framework the weblog editor users. Some crashing bugs fixed.
Fixed a bug with display of dates in feeds that use dc:date tags.
Fixed a crashing bug exposed by an errant feed on Feb. 28.

Wrote an entirely new XML-RPC framework to use in place of the system-supplied framework. This change alone removes a bunch of crashes and glitches in the weblog editor. However, it is extremely likely that there are new bugs. (The benefit is that now the bugs can be fixed rather than just worked around.)
Fixed a bug where sometimes the weblog editor asked if you wanted to save changes when it didn’t need to ask.
Fixed an encoding bug where you couldn’t type < and > in the weblog editor and have them make the round trip to the server and back properly.
The Preferences window toolbar is now a standard toolbar. (Like Mail, Safari, iChat, etc. Reason for the change: UI consistency.)