Looking good. The only thing I would really like is the ability to cmd/shift select feeds in feed list. Also from the screenshot the post name and date are rather large and heavy, not as elegant as the current version.

Being able to delete several feeds at once would be nice.

Personally I don’t like the “label” style for feed groups.

Other than that I think NewsFire is kick ass. I switch back and forth between NetNewsWire and NewsFire, but the only thing that is usually only because I am trying something out in NetNewsWire. Like being able to read news from my PDA using Salling Clicker.

BitTorrent support would be really cool.

I like the reduced interface “weight” similar to iTunes 5 & 6. One thing that it would be nice to have would be the ability to quickly show/hide all items in a feed that are “read.” Another would nice option would be the ability to change the sort order within groups so that it behaves inversely from how it does now (feeds older unread items at the top). Obviously feeds with no unread items should still be at the bottom.

I’d love to see the option of having the content pane use the safari webkit to render the actual page as opposed to the feed content, saving me the constant back and forth between newsfire and safari

It looks very good. I like that the left and right frames are gone.

My one request would be that the author’s name (Is this dc:creator?) be listed on the detail view. It can get confusing on group blogs, like Pandagon or Crooked Timber.

Beautiful. Newsfire has always been one of my favorite looking os x apps and it gets better with each release.

The ONLY things that keep me from using it as my default RSS reader is lack of a webkit browser (although it isn’t that big of a deal) and the ability to synch feed lists between multiple macs (which is important for me). Keep up the great work. Can’t wait to try it out.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it would be nice have the ability to rate feeds iTunes-style. I would like to be able to have a “favorites” smart group that would easily be updated according to my changing tastes.

I second Andy’s suggestion of being able to rate feeds, currently I do this by putting them in groups to filter out feeds I don’t read often, etc.

Does NewsFire already support video podcasts? If it doesn’t then it should be added.

Also, a status window or something for the downloads.

How about the ability to specify which formats you want to support for podcasts and videopodcasts. I watch a couple of feeds that publish in both WMA and MP3 and it is annoying having them both downloaded.

Also I am not sure how you are handling images but sometimes they are really slow to load. I suspect that it is downloading them as the item is viewed. I wouldn’t mind having them downloaded when the feed is refreshed or while NewsFire is idle that way they are cached when I am ready to browse through my feeds.

The ability to export an item or a whole feed in its native format. Would be handy for those of us who use feed at both ends. I have had to hand roll some PHP to generate feeds and it was a pain to debug since everything wanted to load the feed as a feed instead of as source. Ended up having to use IE to view the feed source to see what the problem was.

The ability to choose a group when adding a new feed.

I agree with Nathan Nutter about the Label style. I think an alternating row color thing would be better looking.

No webkit support: keep it this way please. Just because it would be easy to add is no reason to do it. I prefer opening things in my browser of choice instead of a built-in one.

Not big on the idea of a bitTorrent client built-in either. I say just send that stuff to Acquisition or another BitTorrent app. The reason I choose NewsFire over the others readers is because it was more streamlined than they were. Please keep it that way.

Navigating with the arrow keys. That would complete the perfect product for me.

Ta. You make beautiful software man.

Very curious about the new parser! Interface seems to be getting better every time.

As for new features, I’d like to see the headlines show up when right-clicking the icon in the dock. When there’s too little time to read/chek extensively, this is a great half-way house for me.

The only thing I’d like to see is a progress indicator when it’s refreshing feeds.

And if it could fix the display issues I’ve had with :

http://www.appletalk.com.au/syndicate/rss.php
http://www.macnightowl.com/index.xml

That would be great.

NewsFire is looking quite nice. I like that it is lightweight and fast. The only suggestions that I can offer at this point are the following:

1) Ability to display the entire contents of the selected feed in the feed reading pane. Right now all that can be done is view the headlines and click on each one to read a story rather than seeing all the unread stories. Make any sense whatsoever?

2) Ability to sync with Bloglines.

Other than that NewsFire is top notch!

Scott

Thanks for Newsfire, it’s an excellent software and the new version looks good.

These suggestions might already be in the software, but :

- Ability to view only flagged posts (I usually flag posts for later downloading or browsing when I’m using newsfire offline, and have trouble finding them afterwards)
- Better ability to sync Newsfire between a desktop and a laptop machine (I know you have published a backup plugin to do that, but unfortunately I don’t have a .mac account). Maybe just adding a list of the files to be copied would be a good starting point.
- Better offline browsing, as stated above. Downloading in a station for browsing during a train trip without wimax…
- I agree about no webkit browser, or making it an option
- I’ve once tested Newsfire with this : http://www.izynews.com/en/safe_rss/check.xml. Newsfire passes all major tests nicely, and I can see why it doesn’t pass the rest, but the black stylesheet tends to ‘stick’ and even propagate to other feeds… weird.

Second the request for webkit browser support

The ability to sync with bloglines would be nice.

Newfire is my most used app. It is great.

One thought, could use also use the history in Safari to mark a news item as read, even if I haven’t read it in Newsfire. Then if I have already visited a web page, I won’t need to look at the feed.

Keep up the great work.

I usually go through articles quickly by using the space bar. However, it’s a pain when I pass something I decide I’m interested in and want to go back — especially if I’ve moved on to the next feed, or am browsing a smart feed which has everything from the last hour. In that case, the left and right arrows will show me what’s next in the feed in order of date and time, not in the order I read it.

Basically, I’d like some quick keystrokes to go back and forth in the history of what I’ve read (it can be up to a small limit of say 10 or so).

This is not a feature, just a bug :)

I can see that groups are organized in alphabetical order. This works fine when you are using A-Z, but when groups have “national” letters like Å, Ä and Ö (these letters comes after the letter Z in the Swedish alphabet) they will not be organized in alphabetical order (a group called something with Ö for example, will count as the letter O).

I like nickorr’s suggestion of a status for feed refresh as well. (In addition to a status window for download).

David, first off, thanks for an application that I can’t work/live without – and that actually looks good!

I cant wait for the new version, but using the program for a while now, I have a couple suggestions. Some have already been said so I’m just seconding the previous requests.
- It would really be great if there was a way to sync feed lists between machines. Perhaps some sort of proprietary XML?
- I would love it if there was a way to display the page’s favicon in the nav bar. I really like the clean simple look, but sometimes just giving a quick glance and seeing that icons would let me know if its worth turning my head away from work.

Keep up the amazing work.

Hey David nice screenshot!
My gripes:
- I heavily use Newsfire and I have over 50 RSS Feeds. I have Newsfire sort feeds by the number of new items. Sometimes I want to find a specific RSS Feed e.g. Engadget, but I can’t find it easily enough as it is not sorted by name. I would appreciate a search feature for feed NAMES.
- Someone said that earlier and it’s a very useful feature: Show only the new items in a feed (and not the read ones), easily or even as a default method.
- Have the ability to display more than 75 new items per feed.

that’s it, keep up the good work

Sophie, in response to your first point you can create a new Smart Feed that only has one rule – items that meet the condition “Item is Flagger” and you’re all set.

Looking excellent!
Can’t wait ’till it’s out.

Thanks for the teaser David. It’s always great to know that a daily-use app like NewsFire is still getting serious developer attention.

- I second (or third or fourth…) the suggestion of some sort of progress indicator. Even if it’s a separate window. I’m not sure why I want this. The UI is very clean, and I usually don’t care exactly when it’s updating, but maybe I’m just the kind of person that wants to look under the hood. Perhaps a separate window (or even drawer…shudder!) that has a queue. So things are added to it whenever the timer goes off to update a feed, and goes away once the feed is updated. It’d be even better if this were linked in with my next suggestion.

- Prefetching of images. (I might have asked for this before, don’t recall) Perhaps a flag per feed, that’s off by default, but for the common feeds I read with images that have slow servers (or I’m working on a slower connection), it’d be GREAT to have the images ready to go when I space-bar through them at a rapid rate (things like Autoblog come to mind)

- Finally, NewsFire is my default hander for RSS feeds (Obviously!), but I manage all my podcast needs through iTunes, for a variety of reasons. In the add-feed dialog, I’d like a button that redirects the URL to be subscribed through iTunes instead. That would allow me to click on a podcast RSS link, and send it right to iTunes without having to make that my RSS handler as well.

All in all, these are very minor gripes. I’m a happy NewsFire user, and thanks again for your time and thought on the app.

I second the call for a “Ability to view only flagged posts” option. That would be very handy.

New tighter interface is nice.

Great app, probably my most used! ;)

I second the image pre-fetching request above. Also, I recently got an Apple Mighty Mouse. In Safari, Firefox, and Camino, middle-clicking (clicking the scroll-wheel button) a link will open it in a new tab. I’ve gotten so used to that that I’ve been accidentally middle-clicking in Newsfire, trying to open stories. So adding support for middle-clicking to open a story would be great. Also, there’s a UI discrepancy between web browsers and Newsfire: in browsers you command-click to open a link in a tab, with Newsfire you option-click to open a link in the browser. You might consider reconciling this difference.

Otherwise, Newsfire was worth every penny I paid for it. Absolutely top notch, as usual.

My 2 cents:

1) Since you want to have more of the plastic look, why not just switch to plastic theme?
2) Favicons would be nice :)
3) I’m drooling about the torrent support
4) Syncing to bloglines or something like that? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!

Thanks a lot, this is making me happy I paid for Newsfire (1st shareware I ever bothered to buy)

I also think that the addition of a webkit browser and a flag item button might be nice (I know, I know… Im lazy)

Version 1.3′s looking good!

One feature that would be really handy though, is if you could click forward and backwards through the feed items using your mouse’s horizontal scroll.

A few suggestions and comments, and even questions:
- I’d like to see a sort of junk mail global filter in the preferences window. A few of the feeds I subscribe to have advertisements that always begin with somethign like “Advertisement!” of “AD:”, and to automatically not show these from the preferences pane woudl be pretty nice.
- What are those three lines to the left of the SnapBack icon in the top bar? Are they a rating system, or meant to be for resizing?
- Speaking of rating systems, how about it? I think a system whereby one could rate feeds woudl be quite useful.
- Some sort of basic Inquisitor implementation in the search field woudl be a nice touch, to suggest words that are actually there, or depending on how often they appear in feed titles or article titles. Just throwin that out there.
- You seem to be going towards the new iTunes look, is there a way to completely go to that “Metal Aqua” or whatever they’re callign it look? I know Butler can do it (except for the sharper corners), but I’ve never seen it in any other 3rd-party applications.
- This is a little bug: I liek how NewsFire disregards anything beginnign with ‘The,’ but coudl youa lso require there to eb a space after ‘The’ – my smartfeed titled “Theatre” is automatically at the top. Just a minor gripe.
- Optional pre-fetching of images would be great, and the ability to cache them forever would be nice as well.

Ah so, you are correct. The third button configuration of the scroll wheel is consistent with how things work on a PC. I had forgotten that I changed the default from Dashboard to third button as soon as I set up the Mighty Mouse.

Perhaps, then, you might consider making an option in the preferences, allowing the user to select their preferred method for opening a story: option-click, command-click, middle-click, second-click, etc.

All the best.

Three things:

I love NewFire’s simple user agent string. Thank you for not using something dumb like "Mozilla/8.0 (compatible, probably) NewsFire rocks, download it". :-)

Secondly, I see lots of this sort of thing in my logs:
"GET /blog/wp-atom.php HTTP/1.1" 301 "NewsFire/45"
"GET /blog/feeds/atom/ HTTP/1.1" 307 "CFNetwork/10.4.3"
"GET /blog/feeds/atom_0.3/ HTTP/1.1" 200 "CFNetwork/10.4.3"

When sent a 301 response, NewsFire should update it’s internal URL store. I won’t keep those old redirects in my config forever, and unless NF updates people’s feeds are going to break in the long run.

it would be nice if you could send news items (or links to them) directly from newsfire to friends through the mail app. like sending a link or page from safari.

It would be nice if there was a way to contrl+click (or something like this) an article and send a link to it via email.

Sophie: You can view only flagged feeds by creating a smart feed and specifying to only display Flagged items.

Suggestions on Newsfire: I’d like to see inline support for Video blog content — I’d also love to see the “option” to let Newsfire render the feeditem like a browser inline. I wouldn’t want to replace the current functionality, just allow both as an option.

Good work as always David

I’d love to see the ability to automatically unsubscribe to a feed like this. Reason being I frequent some blogs that offer a feed for the comments to a post. I’d subscribe and then have dozens of these dead feeds in my list. It would be great to have the aggregator take care of that house cleaning for me.

I also like Izzy’s suggestion of emailing links directly from NewsFire. I do that quite a bit and its a rather silly cut-and-paste affair.

NewsFire is a very nice, tightly focussed, app and there’s a lot to like about it’s interface, and this new version is looking and sounding good (yay BT support!)

Some possible improvements, that I’d suggest, or second would be:

- view/manage feeds by meta-data, e.g. view least read feeds, to remove unwanted/retired feeds etc.
- ratings on feeds and articles: simple star system
- favicons for quick recognition (view option, default to off)
- read history (move back forth through the articles and feed listings, as you read/viewed them in the app)
- state retention (remember last selected article/feed, and retain read history)
- loading status icon (at least for manually refreshed feeds)
- easily resize fonts (e.g. defacto shortcuts, Cmd +/- to enlarge, or reduce the font size by switching between the CSS styles specified in the preferences)
- an option to show only unread articles.

Thanks for this great app, David.

I agree with Nathan that the label style for groups looks rather out of place, perhaps something similar to the way that smart groups look would be better?

In terms of stuff I’d like to see, as opposed to stuff I’d like to not see:

‘undo’ functionality would be really nifty, pressing cmd+z should find the last item which you read and show it to you. I usually ‘spacebar’ through feeds and have a tendency to ‘shoot past’ an item that I’m interested in, being able to undo would save me a lot of scrolling and annoyance.

A feed specific and global option for a ‘combined view’ similar to the one that NetNewsWire has would also be great. Especially for my Flickr “photos from your contacts” feed, as my 161 contacts upload a hell of a lot of photos (around 1500 in the past three weeks) and it’s quite tiresome to have to press the space bar 100 times and wait for each photo to load to have seen them all.

I’d love to see the new iTunes 6 plastic theme used in NewsFireRSS! Would look wicked!

Is it possible to:
- making forms working from newsfire (ie. wordpress password protected posts, chiawhen the form is submitted it could go into the default web browser)
- add an option to make posts older than XXX days as read
- add an option to delete automatically unread posts outside the “keep items around” range
- in the “cluster groups” and “cluster smart feeds” configuration make the feeds included in the group more visible by adding a light background (maybe a low-opacity version of the group color)
- group of groups

Thanks

Wow! looks AWESOME, David! Can’t wait! I’m not sure if this has been mentioned already, but i would really, really love it is Newsfire could sync my feeds onto my iPod. I think thatd be great.
Also: BitTorrent? KICK ASS!! I love how you keep cross polinating all your apps, acquisition using inquisitor-like smart searching, and now this! fantastic!
I love the new UI, but you really should switch to the official iTunes solid metal, otherwise things might look odd…

I like the label style of the feed groups and the slightly off color background of the feed list in the new picture.

I also would like to second all Andrea’s sugestions (except the grouping of groups).

maybe you could add a second menu level to the menu for “Post to Weblog” to allow choosing something besides the default? I’d like to be able to add things to cocoa.licio.us as my default choice, but to then be able to go into the “Feeds” menu and choose “Post to Weblog Using…” and then “XJournal” or whatever to allow me to also post it to my weblog without having to go into preferences and change it. Maybe you could also add Mail.App and Thunderbird (or just the user’s default mail client) to that list, as people have requested (although with cocoa.licio.us and mail clients being added, maybe it should be named something besides “Post to Weblog”).

Just two feature requests, probably have already been mentioned but I can’t find them on this thread.

1) I just wanted to make sure that NewsFire 1.3 to support the and tags on rss feeds so that a blog by multiple people will say who made a specific post.

2) I would like to have NewsFire allow me to select some feeds as “important” and only bounce the icon and provide a count of those feeds. I subscribe to a lot of a feeds for easy reading, but there are others that I need to watch for professional reasons (new bug lists, changes to a wiki, etc) that I really need to keep track of. Basically being able to label a feel as important and then have only those feeds show up as “new” on the icon would be great.

Great product, btw, even without these enhancements, with these, it would be close to perfect for me.

Can we have a rules system similar to mail.app? I’d like to auto flag items that meet certain criteria or mark as read others. I also use NewsFire with Growl. I like getting notification for some feeds, but for others, e.g. bittorrent feeds, I would prefer not to get notification of new items. Can we have a per-feed supress notification option?

Looks great, can’t wait :)

The only feature / bugfix I’d love to have would be for Newfire items to have proper dates in Spotlight search results. At the moment they all just appear with “No Date” next to them and often get shuffled to the bottom of the results.

I absolutely love NewsFire and use it all the time.

In agreement with some other posters, the one thing I would really like to see is a way of marking some feeds as important and be notified when they’re updated. Personally I would like to see growl support for this but, in addition, bouncing the icon or some other mechanism for non growl users (are there any?) might be useful. Perhaps a ‘notify me’ flag on the feed would be enough to separate the wheat from the chaff!

Looking forward to the new release. :-)

1. I’d like Newsfire to optionally be able to discover sites from Firefox just as it can from Safari; generally more Firefox awareness.

2. Please consider moving the controls at the bottom of the window to the top – I think they get lost there.

3. I’d like the “back from article to list orange ball arrow” button to be … bigger. Not visually but the “hit” area of the whole title bar would be nice. Or just a “lazy way” to “go back” that doesn’t require precise mouse clicking; on a 20 inch (or more) monitor at full resolution, that button gets kinda small.

Not sure if I am missing it or not, but I would like to be able to select which group I add a feed to when I am add a news feed. A drop down list of current groups be sweet. So I don’t have to add a feed, then search for it, then add it to the group. Thanks.

I’d really like bloglines sync.
I have to use a PC at work and since there is no NewsFire for windows, I’d like to try to use Bloglines there to keep me informed during the day. I hate coming home and checking 200 new posts.

Hello,

NewsFire is an amazing application. However, I check my blogs whenever I grab a couple of minutes and usually that requires using a Windows PC to do it. I can’t stand having un-synched versions of all my feeds and this is the main reason I don’t use NewsFire as much as I want to.

I would say that bloglines integration is a must!

Cheers,

Andrew

I cant say enough GREAT things about this app. I love it thx Dave.

There were a few suggestions that other peole made that i liked and had never thought of but the only think that i would really like to see is syncing between machines