NetNewsWire 1.0.3b1

I’ve posted an introduction to NetNewsWire’s new Combined View.

The new view combines titles and descriptions—it’s sort of like a web page, actually, except that you can navigate via arrow keys and the space bar and you can expand and collapse descriptions.

And you can get it from the beta page.

There are some other changes in this beta, mostly bug fixes, but also some new features—such as the ability to read feeds via https. Read the change notes for more details.

Hat tips

The Combined View wouldn’t exist without the work and ideas of other people. Radio UserLand and other browser-based aggregators display news in a similar fashion, with titles and descriptions together.

Jason Kottke suggested this feature for NetNewsWire, and even did a quick mock-up of how it might look. (For comparison, here’s how Jason’s feed actually looks.)

And lots of other people have asked for this feature and kept asking for it—and so we did it.

Finally, some brave souls helped test the alpha versions. The early versions of the Combined View were weird at first, but it got better, thanks to the testers.