NetNewsWire Lite 2.1b24 Change Notes
5 April 2006
This page lists the changes in NetNewsWire Lite since 2.1b18
The current beta of NetNewsWire Lite is available via the beta page. The current release version of NetNewsWire Lite is available via the NetNewsWire home page.
Changes since 2.1b18
NewsGator Syncing
The sync options are now back in the preferences window. Open Preferences, then click the Syncing toolbar button. The Sync Options item in the File menu has been removed. (This change was made because some people had trouble finding the sync settings.)
Read/unread state and single-feed refreshes
NetNewsWire was not syncing read/unread state when refreshing a single feed. Now it is.
Digest authentication
Now using digest authentication instead of basic when talking to NewsGator’s servers.
Proxies
NewsGator syncing should work through proxies now. (Note: this needs more testing. If it doesn’t work, please report it as a bug and include info about your proxy, such as whether or not your proxy takes a username and password.)
Weird passwords
If you had some special characters (like # and ?) in your password, syncing wouldn’t work at all. Fixed. (Though there may still be issues with accented characters.)
Memory leak fixed
Fixed a memory leak in the HTTP client that happened most often when calling NewsGator servers.
Read/unread state changes
Fixed a bug where NetNewsWire could forget about a state change for a news item if it was updated when refreshing the feed. (Normally not an issue, since state is sent to the server right before refreshing feeds, but still, worth fixing.)
Shutdown sync
When quitting NetNewsWire, you are not prompted to send read/unread status sync changes to NewsGator Online (if there are any).
Invitation-to-sync window
If syncing of any kind is not enabled, NetNewsWire will ask you if you want to set up syncing. If you do, it will open the Syncing preferences pane. It will only ask once—and it will never ask if you’ve already set up syncing.
Atom parser
A bug in the Atom parser where text in comments could show up in the description pane has been fixed.
RSS parser
RSS parsing performance
A major performance enhancement in the RSS parser helps especially with large feeds and feeds where the description contains lots of markup. This helps lessen the CPU load while refreshing feeds.
A second performance enhancement with converting characters to entities will also help.
(Some people will notice a big difference. Some people will notice a small difference. Some people won’t notice anything. It depends on the feeds you’ve subscribed to and the speed of your machine).
I tested this on a feed about one megabyte in size with lots of markup. My results (in seconds, averaged over several calls each):
2.1b20: 7.7973425
2.1b21: 0.5171695
RSS parser mnot bug fix
Made it so that this feed can be parsed: http://www.mnot.net/blog/index.rdf
RSS parser preflight
The RSS parser now looks a little more closely at the data before it attempts to parse it, since sometimes what it actually has is an HTML page (or something other than a feed, at any rate). Besides helping performance in some cases, this works around a crashing bug in the CoreFoundation XML parser.
Post to del.icio.us
Added Postr to the list of post-to-del.icio.us apps you can use. http://www.fromconcentratesoftware.com/Postr/
Subscriptions list
Moved the grabber a little to the right to line up better when the scrollbar above is showing.
Made the refresh progress indicator a little wider, since there was more than enough unused space.
Click-through is (finally!) ignored for the subscriptions list. (Also for the outline in the Sites Drawer.)
When you click on the already-selected subscription in the subscriptions list, and a browser tab is active, you now go back to the News Items tab. (Previously this worked only if you clicked on a *different* subscription—now it works if it’s the same subscription.)
A hidden pref was added so that you can choose whether or not to make the selected subscription always bold. Quit NetNewsWire, copy and paste the following into Terminal: defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire boldSelectedSubscription 0 to make it not bold. Change the 0 to a 1 to make it bold (which is the default). (crabwalk, buddy, this one’s for you. ;)
Fixed a bug where dragging a URL from somewhere (embedded browser, other browser) would result in a feed with a title that matched the URL or the title tag of the link. (In other words, it wasn’t picking up the title from the feed. Now it is.)
When adding a subscription, the name at first is the URL of the feed instead of Untitled Source. If it can’t be read, this gives you a little easier shot at figuring out where it came from. (So you don’t have to open the Info window or whatever.) (Exception: if dragging a feed from a location where a title for the feed is placed on the clipboard, then that title is used at first, though the actual title from the feed will over-ride that once the feed is read.)
The subscriptions list now has focus at startup. (Aside from being the right thing to do, it probably fixes an intermittent bug where sometimes the space bar doesn’t do anything at startup.)
Headlines table
option-upArrow now goes to the first item; option-downArrow now goes to the last. (This is standard behavior for tables, but it was being over-ridden when it shouldn’t have been.)
New keyboard shortcut: the l or L key 1) marks all in a feed as read, and then 2) goes to the next unread item (which is, of course, in a another feed). (I call this feature “Daniel Skimming.”)
HTTP client timeout
You can now set the timeout via a hidden pref for the timeout when downloading feeds. (Also affects calls to NewsGator, but doesn’t affect web pages.)
The key is HTTPClientTimeout, a value in seconds. If it’s < 1 or > 60 * 5, then NetNewsWire will make it 60. (60 is the default value, what we normally use.)
The value to this is for people on very slow networks.
Example—to set the timeout to two minutes: quit NetNewsWire if it’s running, then copy and paste the following in Terminal and hit return:
defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire HTTPClientTimeout 120
Misc. Bug Fixes
Crashing bug fixes
A crash-at-startup some people were seeing when NetNewsWire set the default sync prefs has been fixed. (Probably.)
Fixed a crashing related to calculating dinosaur-ness of feed while displaying the subscriptions list. (The dinosaur-ness is now calculated at startup and when the feed updates, rather than when displaying the subscriptions list, which should also be a minor performance boost, but not one that anyone would ever notice.)
10.3.9 compatibility fixes
A bug in the previous beta prevented the Info window from opening if you’re running 10.3.9. Fixed.
Alternate-row colors has returned to the headlines table for folks using 10.3.9. (I had had to turn it off because of an even weirder bug. Fixed. So row coloring is back.)
Other bug fixes
If you’d set NetNewsWire to launch and hide at login, it now actually will hide.
Increased the max height and width of the main window from 2000 to 10000, since some people have really big monitors.
Removed an errant vertical line at the right of the browser header.
Each feed is now saved to disk after it’s processed. This is a revert—we’re going back to the way 1.x, 2.0, and 2.0.1 did things. (The idea is to make it so a crash can’t cause you to lose recently-downloaded items.) Since the writing to disk happens on a background thread, it wont’t block the UI.
During feed refresh, the authentication sheet now always has focus on the username field. (Previously it would be whatever field had focus the previous time.)
NetNewsWire no longer responds to the space bar if ctrl, option, or cmd key is down.
Fixed a threading bug with the favicons downloader controller that could throw an uncaught exception.
Fixed a bug where unreachable URLs of the form http://shazbot/ could make the refresh session stick.
When processing downloaded feeds, now treating links as identifiers only in special cases (as when NewsGator syncing and trying to match an ngitem to an existing item). This will eliminate a bunch of false-positives in the reruns catcher. (However, it will also mean more reruns aren’t caught. Tell people to use unique ids or I will be mad. Mad, I tell you, ma-aa-d.)
