NewsFire 1.2 (Beta 4) is now available and contains the following enhancements over Beta 3:
– improved status bar display when NewsFire is set to open articles in the browser directly
– improved support for some previously invalid feeds
– groups are properly sorted in the smart group rules interface
– fix to prevent cyclical smart group issues
– feed hiding (though, I am personally unconvinced of the need for this feature)

NewsFire 1.2 (Beta 3) is now available and contains the following enhancements over Beta 2:
– fix for validation issues in Beta 2
– corrected performance issue with marking all feeds as read
– fix for occasional Spotlight misbehavior
– fix for rare incorrect ordering in smart feeds

NewsFire 1.2 (Beta 2) is now available and contains the following enhancements over Beta 1:
– added option to cluster groups
– corrected performance issue with marking feeds as read
– improved feed discovery (NewsFire finally looks at <link> tags)
– fixed ‘add to group’ menu inconsistency
– NewsFire now tolerates ‘windows-1252’ and ‘MacRoman’ encoded feeds

I’ve teased you all for long enough – NewsFire 1.2 (Beta 1) is now available for your enjoyment. All the changes are listed on the release notes page. The executive summary is this: it’s faster, it’s prettier, and it’s got a whole lot of little tweaks to elevate the experience.

This is, of course, a beta. Be prepared to run into bugs and please report those bugs! Please note that 1.2 raises the base requirements to Mac OS X 10.3.9, as it relies heavily on the Safari technologies that are in the 10.3.9 release. Of course, it works great with OS X 10.4.

Perhaps this is a bit old, but apparently there has been a minor commotion over the fact that RSS feeds are being called ‘web feeds’ in Microsoft’s IE 7 browser.

To me, it seems like an utterly inane thing to worry about – sort of like arguing over whether it should be called the “WWW” or the “web” or the “net”. If the technology is the same, who cares?

(In fact, I’d argue that ‘web feeds’ is a far more apt name than Google’s recent renaming of RSS as ‘web clips‘)

A pretty innocuous screenshot at first, but a lot of people have requested the ability to have the spacebar move through lists in oldest-to-newest order, rather than the standard newest-to-oldest behavior in NewsFire 1.1, so hopefully this will be a minor thrill to some.