Well picture this – NewsLife 1.5

Christmas has come early for NewsLife users, version 1.5 is now available for download! The big new feature in this update is the Picture Tile mode which you can see in the above screenshot. NewsLife already looks for any images that appear in article summaries and displays a little thumbnail – but wouldn’t it be awesome if you could browse a feed purely by those images? Well now you can, version 1.5 lets you browse a feed purely by thumbnails. If a feed doesn’t contain an image for a given article NewsLife simply swaps in the headline on a cheerfully coloured tile so you still know what else is there.

I think this injects a bit of fun into what can otherwise be a bit of a mundane experience, I hope you enjoy it too! You can of course still browse using the standard list view – there is a little toggle button at the bottom of the window to quickly switch modes as well as menu and keyboard shortcuts.

Also new is a feature that was planned for 1.0 but which never made the cut – you can now filter feeds by author. This is handy if you read a feed where there are multiple contributors, just click the author link at the bottom of the article summary to see everything else published by that person. Where an email or personal website link is provided you can access that too.

Note: You may need to clear and redownload the articles for a feed for the author to be displayed on articles downloaded under earlier versions of NewsLife. Look for the option under the Feeds menu.