NetNewsWire 2.0b45 includes Automator actions

NetNewsWire 2.0b45 adds Automator actions, supports Atom enclosures, and fixes a bunch of bugs. See the change notes for for the full scoop.

You can download this release from the NetNewsWire betas page.

Of all the cool new features in Tiger, Automator excites me most.

When considering what to support first in NetNewsWire, we considered Spotlight and Dashboard. Both are very cool features—but Automator was a better fit because it let us concentrate first on the important thing: making users more powerful, giving users more ways to build their own systems and do more with their data.

So this release contains Automator actions for things like subscribing to feeds, exporting OPML, opening URLs, and getting the URL of the frontmost item.

I think Automator may be a kind of “sleeper hit” of Tiger. Dashboard and Spotlight will get most of the attention up front (as they should), but as people get into Automator, and as more and more actions are available, people will start to see the power it gives them.

Programmers and scripters already know about this, about how it totally changes the game when you can make your computer do all the boring stuff. With Automator this isn’t just for coders anymore.

(P.S. Also see BBEdit 8.2, which includes a bunch of Automator actions.)

We did a couple other Tiger compatibility fixes in this beta, but there wasn’t that much to do: it already worked well with Tiger. (Of course, we continue to look for bugs and appreciate bug reports.)

We’re in the middle of working on screen shots, so we can update the website for NetNewsWire 2.0. (Most of what remains to do is website work, actually.)

For people who enjoy screen shots, here are the ones we’ve done so far:

Activity Window
Bloglines
Browser
Dinosaurs
Flagged Items
Persistence
Podcasts
Search Feed
Searching
Smart List
Syncing
Widescreen