inessential by Brent Simmons

Last day of NetNewsWire sale

Today is the last day of the NetNewsWire $29.95 sale. If you were thinking of buying NetNewsWire, I’d hate to have you miss out.

Here’s what’s coming up for NetNewsWire...

The next release will use Web Kit (the Safari renderer) to display HTML. This will be a big improvement on the current lame HTML renderer NetNewsWire uses.

It will probably also switch to the new URL downloading code that Safari uses.

And of course a bunch of bugs will be fixed.

After that release, the biggest item on the to-do list is synching. My hope is that synching will work not just between copies of NetNewsWire but between NetNewsWire and other aggregators.

I updated the NetNewsWire Feature Ideas page, which lists most of the ideas we’re strongly considering for the future. I added a section at the bottom listing things that have been done since the page was started, so we can have a visible track record.

(And if you have feature requests not listed there, feel free to leave a comment here or email me or post on the bug tracker.)

What about Panther?

I’ve gotten a bunch of email about NetNewsWire and Panther. The only bug I know of specifically is a bug in the networking code in the current Panther seed that can cause NetNewsWire to crash. There may be other bugs, of course.

Here’s the deal: NetNewsWire will run on the final version of Panther. It will probably run on earlier versions of Panther too. But it’s impossible to say when.

I intend to take advantage of new technology in Panther, and have that ready in NetNewsWire before Panther ships. (A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from elaborating yet.)

However, I can’t guarantee that NetNewsWire will run trouble-free on the current Panther seed. Maybe yes, maybe no. It’s not a good use of my time to make sure it runs on an OS release that’s at such an early stage of development. Especially since the Panther bugs are, well, bugs in Panther.