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.
Unsanity has released a Universal Binary version of Application Enhancer, their software preference pane (and set of frameworks) that enables their various handy system hacks and UI additions. Along with Intel Mac compatibility, this update also includes enhancements like:
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
