Brent Simmons has released the first public 'sneak peek' (note: it isn't even a beta) of NetNewsWire 3.0, a much-anticipated new version of his immensely popular RSS client which
NewsGator acquired in 2005. Brent has made a brief announcement
on his blog, reminding everyone that there's still a lot to do, but he also mentions he'll be writing more in-depth about what has changed in the coming days.
Adventurous users - remember:
this isn't even a beta - can check out the
change notes for this public sneak peek, and head over to the
download page to give it a go. For a tasty primer, a
lot is new: Spotlight searching, a much-requested new Combined View, a Full Screen mode, a tab bar on the right with page thumbnails (which can be condensed to mere text titles), the ability to chose a folder when subscribing (a lá Safari bookmarking) and much,
much more. As a personal side note, it's great to see even that
FeedLight style Brent found recently to make its way onto the built-in styles list.
A few words of caution from a blogger who's been testing this version for around a month (hint - that's me): back up your existing NNW support folder if testing software like this makes you queasy. NetNewsWire 3 makes significant changes to the way your data is stored, and you won't be able to run version 2.x without its old support folder after firing up v3. Surfing to ~/Library/Application Support, selecting the NetNewsWire folder and pressing cmd + d is a simple enough backup.
With that said, go enjoy a
sneak peek of NetNewsWire 3.
Here at TUAW, we rather like Brent Simmons' excellent (and now free) news-reader NetNewsWire. Not only does it make a lot of our lives easier by managing our feeds, but the syncing with NewsGator's other online and Windows desktop clients mean that we're (sadly) never far away from the news. If you too are a fan of NNW, then you'll probably want to know about the release of NetNewsWire 3.1.2, fixing (amongst other things):
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