Charles on… anything that comes along

Aha - Brent has at last brought the rest of us into the tent, and produced a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1 (b17 at the time of writing).

What’s new and good:

1. it’s a Universal binary. Unfortunately I’m still only galactic, so doesn’t make any difference. But it runs fine.
2. It’s faster than 2.0.1: the fixes he describes (moving to binary detailing, not updating article lists unnecessarily, putting the “Mark as Read” details into a separate thread) have clearly worked.
3. Beta? It hasn’t crashed on me (yet). Though I have had to do a force-restart of the whole machine which I think is due either to Camino (1.0) or NNW. Or maybe Windowserver.
4. He fixed the bug that I noticed. Which is nice.
5. The “sort by attention” feature is quite interesting, though personally I usually sort my 500-odd feeds manually; the “attention” listing is all over the place, meaning I’m scrolling up and down trying to find feeds I want to quote. But it’s a fun addition, and sometimes software should be about fun.
6. Having the Dinosaur feeds coloured differently in the feeds list is an excellent feature.

What’s wanted and/or missing (so far):

1. No Applescript command to let you script how often a feed should be refreshed. (You can work out how frequently a feed updates, and you could script it accordingly, which would speed up feed downloading and reduce CPU demand. Hell, a future NNW could work this out for itself; if it’s clever enough to work out your attention, it could figure out how often a feed gets updated.
2. It still really whacks the CPU when the feed download hits a smart list. It can be ticking over while downloading normal feeds at 10-20% of CPU, and then hits a smart list: CPU load rockets and the processor maxes out. I don’t like that.
3. Actually, it really whacks the CPU at fairly random times.
4. No option yet in smart lists to choose from feeds based on how old/new a headline is.

Roll on more betas.. Still, he does have a low-priced (we don’t say “cheap”) upgrade path for NNW Lite users while 2.1 is in beta. Sounds like a good deal.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• NetNewsWire 2.0 beta: it's an aggregator! It's a browser! It's *fantastic*! (22 September 2004; score: 69.9%)
• CSS twiddle means more readable in XP? (11 August 2005; score: 42.96%)
• Please, don't send me your Office-beta-created documents (26 July 2006; score: 42.04%)