NetNewsWire 2.1: Sorting by Attention
When I first started working on NetNewsWire back in 2002, my conception of it was pretty simple: it was a way to stop having to click around to all those bookmarks of weblogs to see if there was something new.

Remember doing that? I bet you do—I bet you did it for years, like I did.

So my whole idea, way back when, was that NetNewsWire boosted your productivity, because you didn’t have to keep manually opening these sites in your browser. And, furthermore, you’d probably be able to get more news this way. (Maybe, you know, like from double the number of sites or something!)

Okay—there’s the problem, right there. It didn’t turn out to be double, or three times, or four times—people subscribe to many hundreds of feeds. There are NetNewsWire users with more than a thousand feeds.

Obviously, you want your aggregator to present you with the more important stuff first. As an aggregator developer I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time—and so have NetNewsWire users, and I have a list of ideas and feature requests that is quite long and full of good stuff.

But what would be a first good step, one simple thing that would help right away, that we could do in 2.1?

Sorting subscriptions by attention.

We already had the ability to sort subscriptions by name, unread count, last update. And NetNewsWire already knew some things about your behavior—for instance, it knows when you open an item’s web page. It wasn’t keeping track of things like posting to weblog or posting to del.icio.us, but it is now.

The sort will get better over time, since it’s only just started to track certain things—but even right off the bat I found the feature useful. I was a little surprised to see which feeds I really use the most and which I don’t.

If you use this feature, there are a couple special cases to be aware of, so you know what’s happening:

1. The attention score for a smart list is based on the current contents only—smart lists don’t remember things you did months ago (but other feeds do).

2. The attention score for a group is the average of the score of the feeds inside the group.

P.S. If you use FeedDemon, you may have seen a similar idea: attention reports. Cool stuff.

P.P.S. How many feeds do I subscribe to? 132. I learned a long time ago that I have to be ruthless with ’em. I rely on a few search engine subscriptions and tag subscriptions to fill in the blanks that the regular feeds don’t cover. (My favorite feeds are weblogs of people that I know.)

P.P.P.S. Is this the end of feed management and relevance and all that? No, it’s just the beginning.
09:41 pm #

NetNewsWire 2.1: Print Command
I don’t mind admitting that it surprised me, and continued to surprise me, and kept surprising me, every time a person asked for a Print command in NetNewsWire.

The thing is, this was one of the most common feature requests.

It’s just that, in this Web two-point-oh world, this universe of podcasting and aggregating, who prints? The answer, it turns out, is: lots of folks.

Well, then, right on. So we added a Print command.

It prints either the current description or the current web page (whichever is in front). It’s standard—you can do the normal thing to make a PDF, all that stuff.

01:52 pm #

NetNewsWire 2.1: Post to del.icio.us command
One of the most popular types of AppleScript scripts people write for NetNewsWire is a post-to-del.icio.us command. It’s a natural fit, right? It makes total sense that, if you use del.icio.us, you’d want to be able to send stuff there from your aggregator.

I love it that people could write those scripts—it’s one of the joys of being a developer, when you make it so your app is scriptable so that people can create their own custom workflows.

But, at the same time, it became apparent that this had to become a built-in feature, just because so many people want to do it.

We had some choices:

1. Punt and look at it for a later release. (The scripts, after all, do in fact work!)

2. Write a del.icio.us client and bake it into NetNewsWire.

3. Make NetNewsWire work with other apps that post to del.icio.us.

If you know me, you know we did #3. ;)

(If you don’t know me—one of the things I’m most proud of doing is creating the external weblog editor interface which allows different aggregators to connect to different weblog editors. I like working with other apps and other developers; I like connecting apps.)

Choose your del.icio.us app

What we did: we added a new command in the News menu: Post to del.icio.us. It works with any one of four apps: your default browser, NetNewsWire, Cocoalicious, and Pukka.

The default choice is your default browser, since that’s what most people are probably using already. (If you choose NetNewsWire, it just pops up a window with a web page in it—it’s just the browser-based interface, not a new client.)

The choices I think are very cool are Cocoalicious and Pukka. Both are desktop apps, both talk to del.icio.us, but they have different and interesting approaches. (I’m a big fan, by the way, of apps that run on your desktop but that are Web-centric. No surprise there!)

You already could have chosen one of those apps as your weblog editor in NetNewsWire—but that means choosing between posting to a weblog or posting to del.icio.us, when lots of people do both.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked ’em out, and you post to del.icio.us, you should. They’re cool apps, and Buzz and Justin are cool cats, and it pleases me to be able to connect my stuff to their stuff.

P.S. I’d love to figure out how to make this work with dashLicious too, but I haven’t figured it out yet. It’s a Dashboard widget, which means the context is different than with desktop apps.
01:05 pm #

NetNewsWire 2.1: NewsGator Syncing
Some of you are already familiar with NewsGator, and some of you aren’t—so I’ll explain what the deal is with NewsGator syncing and why it’s cool.

All these feature requests

I’ve long had feature requests like this:

“What about a website version? I’d love to be able to read my feeds online for when I’m away from my regular computer.”

“What about a Windows version? I use Windows at work.”

“What about getting feeds on my phone?”

Feeds everywhere

It became obvious to me that people get their feeds on more than one computer—in fact, sometimes it’s different types of computers (Windows-at-work is common), and sometimes people have cool gadgets where they get their feeds.

But, the thing is, people want their feeds and read/unread state to be the same everywhere.

And so that is what NewsGator syncing is about. It’s not just about NetNewsWire—it’s about having your feeds everywhere.

There’s a web-based version for when you’re away from NetNewsWire. There are other apps (for Windows, mobile phones, Media Center) that sync using the same system.

(You have no idea how many feature requests were, specifically, “Please make it sync with FeedDemon!” Lots of NetNewsWire users are also FeedDemon users. Well, now, cool—they do sync.)

More about syncing

Unlike the .Mac/FTP-based syncing, the NewsGator syncing works in the background, during refresh sessions. (Except for the first sync, that is.)

It’s much less obtrusive—you don’t have to tell it when to sync, it just does it. And there’s no big modal dialog box (except for the first sync), since syncing is just part of downloading feeds.

One of the side effects of this syncing is that, even if you only use NetNewsWire on one machine and don’t use anything else, you still get the benefit of faster feed refreshes. Here’s how it works:

1. At the beginning of a feed refresh session, NetNewsWire finds out from NewsGator Online which feeds need to be downloaded.

2. NetNewsWire then downloads only those feeds. It may be just 5 or 10, or it may be 100—but it doesn’t download every single one of your feeds every time. This saves bandwidth and CPU.

P.S. Here’s a screen shot showing NetNewsWire and NewsGator Online.
01:04 pm #

NetNewsWire 2.1b16 public beta
NetNewsWire 2.1b16—get it while it’s hot!

It’s a universal binary, of course—in fact, it’s been developed on Intel Macs.

The big new feature of this release is NewsGator syncing—but there are also a bunch of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and smaller new features (including commands for printing, emailing, and posting to del.icio.us).

For the full scoop, read the NetNewsWire 2.1b16 change notes.

You can download it from the NetNewsWire betas page.

A few screen shots: NewsGator syncing, refreshing plus XML source window, crazy colors, choosing post-to-del.icio.us app, Print command, sort-by-attention command.

(I’ll be posting more here about some of the individual new features and changes.)

NetNewsWire beta testers sent a bunch of great quotes...

But my favorite one is this from Justin at carpeaqua.com: “NetNewsWire 2.1 is 112 times more gooder than the previous version.”
10:09 am #