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NetNewsWire 2.0 Change Notes

This page lists the changes in NetNewsWire since 1.0.8.

• Flagged items. They’re kept forever (unless you unflag them). You can see all your flagged items via a special Flagged-Items subscription: choose View > Subscriptions > Show Flagged Items Subscription.
• Smart lists are like smart playlists in iTunes—but for news items. You can do things like show all news items that include the word “iPod” in the description and are unread. Choose File > New Smart List... to create a smart list.
• Search engine subscriptions. You can subscribe to searches at Blogdigger, Daypop, and Feedster—that way you can find out what people on the web are saying about a given topic without having to subscribe to all the feeds on the web. Choose File > New Special Subscription > Search Engine...
• Script subscriptions. You can write scripts in AppleScript, Perl, Python, etc. that work like feeds. NetNewsWire runs the script and the script returns an RSS or Atom feed. Choose File > New Special Subscription > Script...
• Support for external weblog editors, including MarsEdit, ecto, Xjournal, Blapp, Cocoal.icio.us—with more on the way. NetNewsWire no longer includes a weblog editor. (If you bought NetNewsWire 1.x, then all MarsEdit 1.x releases are free upgrades for you. So you still have a weblog editor.)
• New application and toolbar icons. The application icon is by Bryan Bell. The toolbar icons are by Bryan Bell and Jon Hicks.
• Searching via the toolbar. (10.3/Panther required.) If you don’t see the Search field, choose View > Customize Toolbar to add it.
• Built-in style sheets. Choose a style from the Style popup menu in the toolbar. Almost all of the style sheets were created by NetNewsWire beta testers—see NetNewsWire’s About window for credits. (If you don’t see the Style popup menu, choose View > Customize Toolbar... to add it. Or choose a style via the HTML preferences pane.)
• Embedded browser, with tabs and scripting support. (You can continue to use an external browser: it’s an option.) The tabs work much like Safari, including keyboard shortcuts.
• Datelines appear in description views (in traditional and widescreen views).
• Comments links appear in description view datelines, to make it easier to jump to the comments for a news item. (Comments links appear only when a feed includes comments links.)
• You can show datelines and/or summaries in the headlines table (in traditional and widescreen views) and customize the colors and fonts of each. View > Layout > Show Summaries in Table and View > Layout > Show Datelines in Table. This is especially useful for widescreen users, where there is less horizontal space but more vertical space.
• Support for enclosures. Enclosure links appear in the datelines in description views. You can also get enclosure information via AppleScript. (See NetNewsWire’s scripting dictionary.)
• Subscription sharing via the feature formerly known as Rendezvous. You can see other people’s subscription lists (if they’re on your local network)—they appear in the Sites Drawer in the Shared tab. To turn on looking for subscriptions and subscripting sharing, open the Sharing tab in the Preferences window. You can exclude subscriptions from being shared via the Info window.
• New navigation pref: you can choose how next and previous unread should behave—see the General preference pane. You can choose to have next/prev. respect the expansion state of the Subscriptions list, always stay at the top level, or always expand groups and go to individual feeds.
• The activity window shows the progress of the current download session. Choose Window > Show Activity Window (or click on the progress indicator in the lower-left corner of the main window).
• You can cancel a refresh session or cancel individual items in a refresh session.
• You can set the number of concurrent downloads from one to 50 via the Downloading prefs pane.
• You can set refresh settings for groups and feeds. Open the Info window and click the Refreshing triangle. You can also set groups and feeds to be skipped during manual refresh and not to be refreshed at all.
• Atom feed support. (At this writing, 19 Sep 2004, the Atom support is not yet complete, but it works for most feeds you’ll find. It will be worked on more before 2.0 ships. It is, at any rate, more complete than in the previous Atom beta we posted a few months ago.)
• Menus re-organized and streamlined. There’s now a File menu instead of a Subscriptions menu; the Scripts menu has a script icon instead of the word Scripts; the Notepad menu is gone. The menu takes up much less horizontal space and is more rational. Most especially: New Subscription is now cmd-N.
• Find old, possibly extinct subscriptions via the Dinosaurs window. Choose Window > Show Dinosaurs.
• Persistence settings—settings for how long to keep news items—can be set for the entire application and for groups and feeds. On the General prefs pane, see “Keep Items.” To set persistence settings for a group or feed, select it and open the Info window and expand the Persistence section.
• Dock menu now organized by group.
• You can completely turn off the dock icon unread count badge. You can also customize its colors—see the popup menu at the bottom of the Fonts preferences pane.
• Over 600 new feeds in the Sites Drawer, plus new categories.
• Favicons are now displayed in the Sites Drawer. (They have to be downloaded first—they don’t show up until downloaded.)
• The Sites Drawer is faster to expand groups.
• Subscribing to local files is easier—choose File > New Special Subscription > Local File... to choose a file on your hard drive.
• In the new subscription sheet, if a URL is on the clipboard, it’s automatically filled in in the sheet.
• When you create a new subscription it’s placed below the current subscription rather than always at the end of the list.
• The help book is almost entirely new, with lots of new pages and revised existing pages. See especially the What’s-New, Questions & Answers, and Tips pages.
• You can now import OPML files that include groups.
• You can export OPML with groups or as a flat list. There’s a view on the exporting sheet that lets you choose.
• When exporting OPML, you can export all subscriptions or just the selection in the Subscriptions list.
• In the Info window, you can exclude subscriptions from being exported.
• It now works to open links from New York Times feeds.
• AppleScript updates. New commands for refreshing, getting the unread count, manipulating browser tabs, and exporting OPML were added. Several bugs were fixed, including a bug where you couldn’t assign a NetNewsWire object to a variable in AppleScript.
• The Notepad was disabled. It will be removed completely in a future version of NetNewsWire. The code has been moved into a separate bundle so it never loads unless you use the Notepad. For more about this, and instructions on migrating to another outliner and/or enabling the Notepad, choose Help > NetNewsWire Help. Click on “Questions & Answers” then click on “What happened to the Notepad?”
• If you select multiple subscriptions in the Subscriptions list, all their news items will be displayed.
• If there are no groups in the Subscriptions list, the left indenting goes away.
• More contextual menu commands appear in the Subscriptions list and headlines table.
• There’s a view-switcher in the main toolbar for quickly switching layouts (traditional, widescreen, Combined View.) (Panther only.) To add it, choose View > Customize Toolbar...
• Performance, scalability, bug fixes—too numerous to mention. We routinely tested with subscription lists of around 1000 items in order to improve speed and scalability.
• Got rid of that column in the headlines table with the ellipses in it. In its place is a flag column (it shows a flag for flagged items).
• The view-XML-source window now uses your default font and font size for viewing plain text. (In practice this is usually Monaco 10.)
• The Info window now includes multiple sections with disclosure triangles so you can show the info you want to see.
• Syncing is still a work-in-progress—it will improve before 2.0 ships. It’s possible to get it to work, but consider it a thrill-seeker’s feature for the moment.
• The progress indicator at the bottom-left of the newsreader window now shows the progress for an entire refresh session rather than for each download in the session. (And you can click on it to open the Activity window.)
• When trying to read a password-protected feed, NetNewsWire will prompt you with a sheet for your username and password. (It works much like using a browser.)
• Errors window lists downloading and parsing errors. Choose Window > Show Errors.
• The left margin of the current URL at the bottom of the newsreader window stays pinned to the left margin of the headlines/descriptions pane.
• Shift-space now scrolls upward in the description pane.
• Subscriptions are now stored in their own file, at ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Subscriptions.plist.
• NetNewsWire now backs up your subscription list on startup (max. one backup per day). Backups are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Backups/.
• News item status changes are written to disk more frequently, so in the case of a crash you don’t end up with all the news items from your session unread.
• The headlines pane gets a horizontal scroll bar when needed.
• Some bugs with relative URLs in news items were fixed.