NewsMac Pro 1.1 change summary

I’m hoping to finish 1.1 this week and get it to testers for a public release next week sometime. Here is a summary of what’s new in this release:

New features

• Adaptive interface – basically the interface configures itself differently depending on the task you’re currently performing. E.g. when you want to view a headline in the web browser it automatically grows to fill the width of the window, but then shrinks back down when you go back to viewing headlines. Irrelevant table columns disappear when not needed (e.g. search rank when you’re looking at your bookmarks). See it in action! [obsolete link removed] 1MB H264, kinda blurry, early beta.
• New headlines item in the source list displays all freshly downloaded headlines.
• You can now turn off both the unread column (which displays those coloured circles with unread headline counts) and the My Rating column so you can make the channel list really skinny.
• Podcast player – plays and logs all your podcasts so you don’t have to clutter iTunes.
• Setup assistant (appears first time you run NewsMac and gives you the option to turn off the built-in channels, import your existing RSS feeds from OPML or just to start with a blank canvas.
• Option to display channels with small icons.
• Check for new version option – ’bout time I added this really.

Fixes and Improvements

• Channels now finish updating much more quickly because downloaded headlines don’t get indexed until after each channel has been downloaded and parsed.
• NewsMac no longer forgets the positions of each splitter view (yay!).
• The publication date displayed by each channel is now always the publication date of the last headline. For what ever reason an awful lot of RSS feeds have screwy dates specified in the feed level pub date/last build date tags. For Atom feeds I’m still using the publication date specified for the whole feed, in general atom feeds seem to be a bit less quirky than RSS feeds but I might change this too at some point just so the behaviour is consistent.
• Other stuff I can’t think of right now.
• NewsMac now correctly identifies and parses Atom 1.0 format feeds, no support for atom enclosures yet though. I’ll probably add that when someone moans at me to do so, because everyone seems to be using RSS 2 for podcasting atm.

I think this release covers the majority of the requests I’ve had for new features to date.