NetNewsWire and MarsEdit public betas

NetNewsWire 2.0b3—full and Lite versions—are now in public beta.

Here’s what’s new in 2.0 and here’s the download page.

If you bought (or will buy) any version of NetNewsWire 1.x, all NetNewsWire 2.x upgrades are free.

Here are a few screenshots of NetNewsWire 2.0: setting up a smart list, creating a new search engine subscription, using the new embedded tabbed browser, a collection of built-in styles, and the activity window.

MarsEdit, our new weblog editor, is also in public beta: it’s designed to make weblog writing like writing email.

If you bought (or will buy) any version of NetNewsWire 1.x, all MarsEdit 1.x upgrades are free too. In other words, if you already bought NetNewsWire, you own a license for MarsEdit.

Here’s a screen shot that shows both NetNewsWire and MarsEdit—the Post-to-weblog button has been clicked in NetNewsWire, and the post has opened in a new window in MarsEdit. (More screen shots appear on the MarsEdit home page.)

So, what’s the deal?

We get so many great feature requests, and we wanted to add a bunch of new features to NetNewsWire. But we realized there wasn’t really room to add features to the newsreader and the weblog editor both unless they were split into separate applications.

NetNewsWire’s new features including searching, flagged items, persistence, per-feed refresh settings, new icons by Bryan Bell and Jon Hicks, embedded browser, smart lists, search engine subscriptions, script subscriptions—and more. The weblog editor was removed completely.

MarsEdit was more of a from-scratch application. We kept (but revised) some of the under-the-hood plumbing that was in NetNewsWire’s weblog editor, but then we completely re-designed the user interface to make it work more like email. There’s a main window that lists your weblog and recent posts, and you create and edit posts in separate windows—just like using an email program.

Another thing we wanted to do was make it possible to mix and match newsreaders and weblog editors. See the page on NetNewsWire and external weblog editors.

We also wanted to make it so NetNewsWire Lite users could have a Post-to-Weblog button—and now they do. When it comes to weblog editing, there is no difference between NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite.