inessential by Brent Simmons

NetNewsWire 2.0 Progress Report

Now that the ship date of Tiger (April 29) has been announced, now might be a good time for a progress report on NetNewsWire 2.0.

NetNewsWire is close to being finished. Since the most recent public beta I’ve been fixing bugs and Sheila has been adding more sites to the Sites Drawer.

It’s not going to ship this week—it’s not quite that close—but it’s getting there. (We haven’t set a date, because any date we set will be wrong. It will ship when it’s ready.)

What remains to do:

1. Fix more bugs.

2. Finalize the Sites Drawer.

3. Finish updating the Help book.

4. Update the website.

Of course, these happen concurrently, and Sheila and I both are hard at work. (The cat too is working long hours, though at what we’re not entirely sure. The code word is tuna. Pass it on.)

A brief look back is in order. For my benefit if no one else’s—it’s good for me to step back and look at the whole thing, even while I’m in the midst of concentrating on a series of very small details as I fix bugs.

Here are the main new things in 2.0 (in no particular order):

  1. Podcasting/enclosures support
  2. Bloglines subscriptions
  3. Searching
  4. Search engine subscriptions
  5. Tag subscriptions
  6. Scripted subscriptions
  7. Smart lists
  8. Atom support
  9. Embedded tabbed browser
  10. Removed the notepad
  11. External weblog editor API (and MarsEdit)
  12. Dinosaurs window
  13. Subscriptions list sorting
  14. Syncing via .Mac and FTP
  15. Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) sharing
  16. Styles, built-in and customizable
  17. A thousand or so new feeds in the Sites Drawer
  18. UI makeover
  19. Flagged items
  20. Persistence
  21. Lots of per-feed and per-group settings
  22. Activity window
  23. File downloads window
  24. Datelines/summaries in headlines table

Not bad for a 2.0 release, I think. (What is harder to describe is how it’s not just a collection of new features but a much better designed app than 1.0.8, both above- and below-the-hood.)

Our private testers are saying “time to ship.” We’re thinking the same thing.

We’re also thinking about what comes next. There is absolutely no shortage of great ideas—we’ve got plenty of our own, and folks send us tons of excellent feature requests.

It’s just a matter of setting priorities—and that’s where you can help. What would you like to see next?