NetNewsWire 2.0b6 Change Notes
This page lists changes to NetNewsWire since 2.0b3.
(You can download the current beta from the NetNewsWire beta page.)
The main goals of this release were 1) to fix some high-priority bugs and 2) make the Find panel work. We are continuing to work on new features and bug fixes for later betas.
2.0b6: 22 October 2004
Demo expiration fix
If the demo has expired, NetNewsWire still reads items from disk. This prevents it from over-writing your flagged items and read/unread status when the demo expires.
Crashing bugs fixed
Fixed a crashing bug during refreshes when a feed URL starts with something unexpected followed by a : character.
Fixed a crash that sometimes happened when marking-all-as-read in Combined View.
Memory use bug fixed
If you were using a style sheet that used one or more images, multiple copies of the images would be stored in memory, which meant that NetNewsWire used more memory over time. No longer. (This appears to be a WebKit bug, actually, for which we found a workaround.)
For some people, this will make a huge difference in how much memory is used.
Find Panel
The Find panel now works. You can also find next and previous via cmd-G and cmd-D. The Find panel does a find in whatever has focus—subscriptions outline, headlines, sites drawer, web page, etc. (There are some areas where it doesn’t work yet—Dinosaurs, Errors window—but it works in the most-often-used places.)
Refreshing
If you have refresh at startup turned on, NetNewsWire now doesn’t wait so long to start refreshing.
RSS Enclosures
Enclosures now appear at the bottom of combined view items. A couple feeds you can try: http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithAacEnclosures.php and http://live.curry.com/rss.xml
Clicking on links in HTML views
Cmd-clicking a link now always opens a new tab in NetNewsWire, no matter what your prefs are.
Shift-clicking a link does the opposite of the prefs: it opens in external browser if normally you open in NetNewsWire—and vice versa. (Why not use option-click for this? So that we can reserve it for downloading a link, which is what option-click does in Safari. It’s a consistency thing. But right now option-clicking doesn’t do anything special.)
We wanted to make the scroll-wheel-button open links in new tabs, but for technical reasons it may not be possible right now. (It appears not to be supported in WebKit. We don’t know how Safari does it.) We’ll continue to investigate.
In the headlines table, the option key still determines whether or not to use the opposite of the prefs—this is because shift-click and cmd-click have other meanings in table views.
Browser
If you open a URL that’s already open in a tab, it doesn’t open it in a new tab. (In other words, it ignores duplicates.) (However, it’s somewhat strict about this. It will deal with missing trailing slashes, but URLs that result in a redirect won’t otherwise be handled as duplicates.)
If plugins are enabled, NetNewsWire will open files of .mp3, .mov, etc., otherwise they’re sent to the external browser (if clicked on).
Added Close Tab command to gear menu.
Sites Drawer
Added 99 more feeds to the Sites Drawer.
Stylesheets
Noah’s BeBox styles are now two—BeBox and BeBox+Tracker. Also included update to Gray Lady.
New Spotlight style sheet by Matthew Maber. Added Nathan Herald’s Spotlight variation (Spotlight - Top Header). It’s a hybrid of Spotlight and Daring Status Bar.
New style sheets by Eric A. Meyer: 15 Petals, NNW Classic Default, and Popper. New Autumn style sheet by Derik DeLong.
Updated style sheets: Dashed+ by Andy Fragen and Timbru by Gabriel Radic.
Subscriptions importing
After importing OPML subscriptions, the overall unread count wouldn’t reflect unread items in the imported subscriptions. Fixed.
Subscriptions outline
Disabled click-through in the subscriptions pane.
Headlines table
New contextual menu commands: Open in NetNewsWire and Open in Default Browser. The command that is the opposite of your prefs is what appears.
Dock menu, dock icon
You can now tell the Dock menu to open links in NetNewsWire or not. There’s a new command: Open Dock Links in NetNewsWire. Choose the command to toggle it. It gets a checkmark if links should open in NetNewsWire.
Fixed a bug where, if you choose Mark All News as Read in the dock menu, the dock icon badge wouldn’t update right away.
Made it more likely that the Dock will notice that NetNewsWire has restored the normal app icon on quit.
Fixed a bug where if you open an item from the Dock menu in the Lite version, NetNewsWire’s main window would always come to the front.
Script subscriptions
In script subscriptions, the favicon in the description pane is now the icon of the file (instead of just a question-mark image).
Potential CPU usage fix
If the app isn’t active, the style sheets and scripts folders aren’t checked for changes—and the time between checks of those folders has been increased. This may fix a CPU usage bug a few people have reported (but that we can’t, unfortunately, reproduce).
Lite description view
Removed an Open Link in New Tab command that would appear when you ctrl-click on a link. (It’s still in the full version, of course.)
Double-click on Source column to open home page
In NetNewsWire 1.x, if you double-clicked on an item in the Source column, it would open the home page instead of the item. We discovered that people found it confusing.
But not Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch—he wanted this feature back. So we made it a hidden pref. To turn it on:
- Quit NetNewsWire if it’s running.
- Launch Terminal.
- In Terminal, type the following then hit return:
defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire doubleClickSourceColumnOpensHomePage YES
(The above should be all one line.) - Launch NetNewsWire.
To turn it off, repeat the above with NO instead of YES.