NetNewsWire 2.1 public beta offers Newsgator syncing, more enhancements

It's been a long time coming boys and girls, but Ranchero has unveiled a public beta version of their much-anticipated 2.1 update to the most popular RSS reader out there: NetNewsWire. As Scott's preview earlier this month mentioned, the most buzz-worthy new feature by far is headline syncing with Newsgator (the app's new overlords). However, the change notes for the update list a whole new set of features that I find more interesting like posting to del.icio.us, emailing headlines and an interesting new ability to sort subscriptions by "attention." This means NetNewsWire can sort headlines according to statistics like how often they are opened, posted to del.icio.us and more. The overall performance and responsiveness of NetNewsWire has dramatically increased from a number of enhancements, one of the most notable being that it is now a Universal Binary.

The NetNewsWire beta is at 2.1b17 as of this writing, and it is a free upgrade for registered users. As far as I know, the free Newsgator account compatible with syncing is not available yet. One final word of caution if you decide to make the jump: back up your NetNewsWire support folder just in case something goes wrong. After all, it is a beta.

I played around with the beta on my PowerBook and must say: NetNewsWire has gotten a lot zippier. Things like marking large amounts of headlines (600-1000 or more) as read are much faster, and the UI has received some welcomed polish. Even with these updates, however, my newsreading still belongs to endo. At the end of the day though, it's great to see newsreading apps as a whole pushing the medium and offering useful features that get everyone's RSS feeds flowing.

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Source: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/beta.php

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It's been a long time coming boys and girls, but Ranchero has unveiled a public beta version of their much-anticipated 2.1 update to...

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mikel egurra

i've also tried using endo and just can't seem to kick the nnw habit.

i've installed the almost-daily updates to endo but i gave up a couple of days ago.
i'm so used to the keyboard shortcuts and the way nnw behaves that i'm gonna need some coaching to get the endo way of doing things...

March 20 2006 at 7:32 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brendan Sheehan jnr

Newsfire is better!

March 19 2006 at 9:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ben

I decided to try the beta mostly because it was universal.

So far so good, it seems very stable and definitly more responsive than previous vesions running in rosetta.

It also seems to sync fine via .mac with previous versions.

Now if blogsmith was supported by marsedit the world would be right.

March 19 2006 at 2:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Joe Eversole

I just ranted about this a week ago in my blog. To most people, it doesn't sound that exciting. It's quite possibly the best thing to happen to me in ages. My customer prohibits non-company assets on the LAN, and they are a Windows shop. So, either my options are to manually read through everything in the evening that I read during the day, use a strictly Web based system like Bloglines, or not read anything at work.

If only other great news readers added such synchronisation (my current rss aggregator dream: endo that synchs up with Feedlounge.)

March 19 2006 at 2:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mike Harris

Give me NNW any day. ;-)

March 19 2006 at 1:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Blah

I'll be sure to check this out when I have the chance. I've tried using endo many times since it was released, and each time I find something that makes me hate it more and more. Groups are such an odd way to read RSS feeds. Most people I know will just read through the feeds one at a time and I do the same. Having groups like those in endo just adds an extra step and makes it more of a pain to read what I want to read.

March 19 2006 at 11:57 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

yonatron

If you just sign up for a free NewsGator account, NNW will sync just fine. I don't know if they'll upgrade that one to a fancier account, or if you'll have to ditch it and start a new one when the final release is out.

But if you're desperate to try it now (I was), just sign up at NewsGator's page. It pretty well rocks.

March 19 2006 at 11:15 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply