NetNewsWire 3.0d7: Super Early Sneak Peak

I want to try something a little different—I want to work on NetNewsWire 3.0 a bit more out in the open than I usually do. I’m not sure it’s wise, exactly—but it’s more fun for me. ;)

So I put up a super-early sneak peak release. It’s not a beta, it’s not even an alpha, it’s at 3.0d7.

You can download it here. (But I warn you with big red letters that it’s a work in progress, and you shouldn’t try it out if you’re not comfortable with it.)

The big new thing—the thing I’m personally excited about—is the brand-new, totally rewritten Combined View.

The old Combined View (like a newspaper or river-of-news view, for those who don’t know) had some performance issues because every single news item was a separate webview. If you had 100 items, that was like 100 mini-web-pages.

The new version uses just one webview—but, even though it’s a single web page, you can still navigate with the space bar and arrow keys, you can still expand and collapse. It still has the concept of a selected item.

(Or you can just scroll and point-and-click. It works with both styles of reading.)

Here’s a screen shot of the new Combined View. Here’s another screen shot.

As I say, it’s a work in progress, and feedback (especially on the new Combined View) is definitely welcome. There will be a bunch of other new features and lots of bug fixes. (If you were hoping to see ____, and it’s not there, consider that it’s still early in the process. That doesn’t mean ____ is not on the list.)

Also—NetNewsWire 3.0 will be a free upgrade.