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NetNewsWire 1.0.2 Change Notes

This page lists changes to the full version of NetNewsWire from 1.0.2b1 through 1.0.2.

1.0.2: 12 May 2003

• Updated the About window.
• Made a little fix in the Sites Drawer.

1.0.2fc1: 10 May 2003

• Updated the Help book to match the changes in 1.0.2.
• Added a few more sites to the Sites Drawer.

1.0.2b10: 10 May 2003

• Fixed—perhaps entirely or perhaps just partly—a crash in the weblog editor, the [WeblogEditor(items) type] crash. More testing will indicate if this is fixed entirely or not.
• Fixed a weblog editor bug where if you held down the mouse and changed selections, and moved the selection to or away from a draft, that draft could be over-written.
• If a Blosxom sub-folder is selected in the weblog editor, and you click New Post, the sub-folder remain selected so you can create a new post in that sub-folder.
• After posting a new Blosxom file, the new post is now selected, ready for editing.
• After posting an edited Blosxom file, the post remains selected for further editing.

1.0.2b9: 10 May 2003

• Fixed a couple bugs with headlines that are the same in multiple feeds. Sometimes these duplicates would throw off the unread counts of a feed, its group, and the new-headlines view. This issue may or may not be entirely fixed now—it’s very improved, at a minimum. (Most of the time this bug was reported by people who subscribe to multiple BBC feeds or to both of Apple’s OS X Downloads feeds.)
• Further improved the undo/redo support in the weblog editor when making text bold or italic, making text a link, or applying a custom tag.
• Restored MacNN to the list of default subscriptions for new users, since it does in fact have a feed with descriptions. (I just didn’t know about it before.)

1.0.2b8: 9 May 2003

• Undo now works properly in the Weblog Editor when you make text bold or italic, make a link, or apply a custom tag.
• Fixed a bug that would sometimes prevent NetNewsWire from reading a feed it has found via RSS discovery.
• Disabled Dock menu’s Refresh All News command when a refresh is in progress. (This matches a change previously made to the toolbar and to the News menu.)
• If you choose Subscribe... from the Dock menu, NetNewsWire will come to the front (if it’s not frontmost already).
• Fixed a bug where the current text being edited in the Weblog Editor could be lost if you chose Post to Weblog from the News menu or if you chose one of the Post to... contextual menu commands in the Headlines pane. Now the text is automatically saved (if it’s a draft) or automatically saved as a draft. (Yes, this could be better—but the important thing is it solves the problem of text disappearing.)
• Removed MacNN from the list of default feeds for new users because it does not have summaries.

1.0.2b7: 8 May 2003

• Fixed (probably) a crashing bug in the Notepad when deleting items.
• Improved the layout of several of the Preferences panels.
• Click-through for toolbar buttons has been restored. However, there is now a pref on the General prefs panel for disabling click-through for toolbar buttons.
• Added MacCentral to the list of default feeds for new users. (Now that MacCentral includes summaries in their RSS feed.)

1.0.2b6: 7 May 2003

• In the Movable Type options window, you can now choose Default for allow pings, convert line breaks, and allow comments. They’re all popup menus now.
• When saving a draft for a Movable Type weblog, the various extra MT options are saved with the draft.

1.0.2b5: 6 May 2003

• Potentially fixed the most common newsreader crash, the updateUnreadCount crash. Early testing indicates it’s fixed, but more testing is warranted. Please send me crash logs.
• Fixed a bug where, at startup, unread items could be duplicated in a feed’s group. So if there were 10 unread in a feed, the group would have 20 unread from that feed—each unread item twice.
• Added MacInTouch to the Sites Drawer. Duh.

1.0.2b4: 5 May 2003

• Fixed a bug in the new thread-throttling code that could sometimes prevent a refresh-all from working, whether scheduled or manual.
• Made it so that you can’t manually kick off a refresh-all while one is already going on.
• The striping in the Headlines pane goes all the way down now, a la iTunes and other apps.
• When a window isn’t in front, all its toolbar buttons are disabled, so people don’t get bitten by unexpected click-through actions.
• Moved the Show Sites Drawer command from the Window to the View menu.

1.0.2b3: 4 May 2003

• Fixed a thread deadlock case. Further testing will determine if there are more thread deadlock cases.
• Potential fix for the updateUnreadCount crash, the most common crashing bug in the news reader. (I’ve never seen that crash on my machines. Go figure.)
• Updated the Sites Drawer. A new Latest Additions folder in the Sites Drawer contains the most recent sites added. There are some cool sites in there—Gary Hart, Jeffrey Zeldman, Karelia Software, MobileTracker, and lots more.
• The news reader window title says how many unread headlines there are, as in NetNewsWire (16 unread). If there are no unread headlines it just says NetNewsWire.
• When you ctrl-click (or right-click) to get a contextual menu, the item you clicked is now selected.

1.0.2b2: 3 May 2003

• Possible fix (at least a partial fix) for the jumpy cursor in the headlines table when the current feed is being updated.
• When you drag a URL into the Subscriptions window, you used to get an annoying dialog about subscribing to that URL. That dialog has been removed—it just does it, it subscribes.
• One of the bugs with RSS items that appear in more than one feed was fixed. In the past, a duplicate item wouldn’t always get marked as read when selected. Now it does.
• Lowered the thread priority of feed-reading threads, so the app is kinder to the CPU.
• Fixed the thread-throttling so you don’t get those situations where you have 30 or 50 or 100 feed-reading threads at once.
• When you drag a subscription or headline to the Finder, the resulting .webloc file now has the name of the subscription or title of the headline (instead of the URL) as the file name.
• Fixed a bug where itms:// links didn’t work in the HTML description pane. Now they work: you can click on them and iTunes will open the URL.
• Fixed a bug where the first item in the contextual menu in the headlines pane would show undecoded entities if a headline title contains entities.
• If you set the transparency prefs so that the main window was invisible or nearly so, then when you re-launched you wouldn’t see the window. I added a sanity check so that transparency is set to 50% at startup in this case, so you can’t lose the main window at startup.

1.0.2b1: 1 May 2003

• When editing Radio sites, a Post to Home Page checkbox appears above the Post button. It’s checked by default. But if you want a post to not appear on the home page, uncheck it.
• When editing Movable Type sites, a More Options button appears above the Post button. If you click it, you get a window with the following options: Allow trackback pings, Convert line breaks, Allow comments (None, Open, Closed), Extended Entry, Excerpt, and URLs to Ping.
• The View menu has returned. It has commands for which columns to display, sorting by columns, showing unread counts, showing the aggregate view, showing Subscriptions pane icons, and customizing the toolbar.
• Performance boost: the code that updates the aggregated and group views was running unnecessarily, when a subscription was read but when it hadn’t changed. Duh! Now it runs only when a subscription changes.
• The aggregated view and group views update with multiple subscriptions at a time now, rather than with each subscription. This means less duplication of work and better performance.
• Fixed a bug where the dock menu would sometimes show a source that has no unread items.
• For each subscription in the dock menu, there’s now an Unsubscribe menu command.
• Fixed a memory leak where subscriptions that got deleted didn’t really get deleted. (They were hanging around in some weird array somewhere, playing craps and smoking cigarettes.)
• Fixes for HTML entity decoding. The previous system was totally re-written. (It needed to be. It was a total hack.) The main visible benefit will be that hex entities of the form  will be decoded. Previously they weren’t. (Example feed which work better now: http://www.worldpress.org/feeds/topstories.xml) Another benefit will be less crashes—since the previous hack was to use NSAttributedString’s initWithHTML method which crashed sometimes. A side effect of this change may be a very minor performance enhancement when parsing RSS feeds.
• Weblog editor XML-RPC fixes: fixed a memory leak and improved error handling.
• When the HTML pane has focus, the space bar works to scroll or go to the next unread headline. Other keys also do the expected things. (The keyboard shortcuts have been totally overhauled, removing lots of duplicate code and making things work as expected more often. It’s possible that bugs were introduced, so let’s watch for that.)
• Cursor changing when hovering over links in the HTML pane is better. (It still doesn’t show the URL in the status bar, however. There’s a good chance that feature will wait for the Safari renderer.)
• Disk caching bug fix—if a subscription has no headlines, it doesn’t get cached on disk. This prevents a situation where a failed read could wipe out a good cache.
• When marking a headline read or unread via the headlines pane contextual menu, the headline is re-displayed to reflect its changed status. Fixed a bug where it wouldn’t get re-displayed.
• Fixed a bug where if you click the dock icon, and all windows are closed, and the sites drawer is expanded, the news reader window would not appear. It should appear, and now it does.
• The Show Info command now appears in the contextual menu in the subscriptions pane. (Note: when you choose the command, the selection changes to the subscription you clicked on. This is because the Info panel is an inspector: it always shows info for the current subscription.)
• Fixed a crash that happened if you dragged off the Sites Drawer toolbar icon and opened or closed the sites drawer.
• The weblog editor window has a better minimum size—so now the buttons shouldn’t smoosh all over each other if you shrink the window.
• NetNewsWire checks the amount of free disk space at startup. If it’s less than 10MB, it displays a dialog letting you know. Your only option is to quit. (It should probably check free disk space periodically, but this is a start at least.)
• Feeds that claim to be Shift_JIS encoded no longer crash the app. They don’t get parsed, but at least they won’t cause a crash anymore.
• If you saved as a draft, then posted the draft to a Radio site, often you’d get an XML error back from Radio and the post would fail. Fixed.
• Focus rings now appear around tables, outlines, and text views. Made the split view divider thickness a little wider to accommodate the focus rings.
• You can now type accented characters in the Notepad.
• Increased the connection timeout when reading feeds, so failed reads should happen less.
• Cmd-right-arrow and Cmd-left-arrow now work in outline views to expand and collapse.
• Cmd-right-arrow and Cmd-left-arrow now work in text views to move the cursor to the beginning and end of lines.
• Cmd-up-arrow and Cmd-down-arrow now work in text views to move the cursor to the beginning and end of the text.
• In Notepad menu, changed command keys for indenting and outdenting to Cmd-] and Cmd-[, since Cmd-rightarrow and Cmd-leftarrow have other meanings. (Tab and shift-Tab also work. No change there.)
• In Notepad menu, changed command keys for moving lines up and down to Cmd-option-right-arrow and Cmd-option-down-arrow, since the original command keys have other meanings.
• In outline views other than the Notepad, using . and , to expand and collapse doesn’t make the system beep anymore.
• Reading feeds from the disk cache at startup is faster now and locks up the UI less.
• Fixed a few memory leaks.
• Improved performance when updating the special new headlines feed and groups.
• The special new headlines feed and groups now automatically prune unread items when there are greater than 100 items in the feed. This actually was intended from the start, even though it’s happening just now. This should also help performance.
• Some operations that were moved to the main thread in 1.0.1 are now back to separate threads. This may help performance—at least it should help with perceived performance.
• The spell checker’s dotted underlines in the weblog editor kept getting wiped out by the syntax colorizer. Fixed. (A welcome side effect of this fix is that typing should be a little more responsive, though perhaps not noticeably so.)
• Fixed a bug in the date column of the RSS reader where sometimes it would give the date rather than the time when the date is the current day. (It was due to a time zone conversion issue, now fixed.)
• When viewing the RSS source for a feed, if it starts with a byte-order mark, those bytes aren’t displayed in the view-source window.
• Fixes for dc:dates—if a date doesn’t include seconds, NetNewsWire will now parse it correctly. If a date ends with a Z rather than a time zone offset, NetNewsWire will now parse it correctly.
• Moved a *ton* of stuff into separate frameworks. Most of this is low-level stuff like the RSS parser. This is very good for the overall under-the-hood health of the product but it doesn’t otherwise have visible impact.