31 Dec 2004

NetNewsWire 2.0b10: podcasting, Atom, bug fixes, more

NetNewsWire 2.0b10 includes bug fixes, a rewritten Atom parser, a bunch of small new features and enhancements—but the feature that will probably get the most attention is podcasting support.

Note: it’s still a beta. It still has bugs. In fact, one of the changes we made was that, the first time you launch it, a window appears that reminds you it’s a beta.

Some of the changes you were waiting for—they’re in there now. Some things you’re waiting for aren’t there yet—but we’re working on them!

The change notes go into more detail.

Screen shots

Before talking more about podcasting, here are a few screen shots, since the look of things has changed a little bit since the previous beta:

Podcasting

We weren’t originally going to add podcasting support to NetNewsWire 2.0—but after intense lobbying by a thousand and one podcast enthusiasts, we changed our mind.

Here’s the gist of how it works:

1. Whenever there’s a news item with an enclosure, NetNewsWire tells you, and gives you buttons you can click to download it to disk or to iTunes.

2. You can tell NetNewsWire to download enclosures automatically or not.

3. You can tell NetNewsWire to send audio enclosures to iTunes. You can tell it to use the name of the feed as the playlist name, or you can specify a playlist name. You can also specify a genre and you can tell NetNewsWire to delete downloaded files after sending them to iTunes.

4. You can create a smart list that shows all your enclosures.

(See some of the screen shots further up to see what all this looks like.)

This is all still beta, of course—there may be bugs, and the feature may still evolve based on feedback.

More features

There are a bunch of other cool things I want to point out—but I’ll save them for follow-up posts...