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NewsFire 1.6 Beta 1

NewsFire 1.6 Beta 1 Hot on the heels of the release of Safari140, I’m pleased to release the first beta of NewsFire 1.6. Similar to Safari140, NewsFire now supports direct posting to Twitter, using the same hotkey shortcut and interface.

In addition, NewsFire 1.6 has an updated visual design and now has built in auto-updater support (via Sparkle) for pain-free upgrades.

Download NewsFire 1.6 Beta 1
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard required.

  • February 17th, 2009 12:26 am

43 comments...

O-Jay...

Great David, that’s what I’ve been waiting for so long.


Chris...

Clicking through to the feeds url no longer marks the feed as read, something new or a bug?


André...

This is great!! I love newsfire.
Is a sync feature on the horizon?

Thank you. I looks great.


ssp...

Great to see that you continue working on NewsFire, Dave.

I’ll use this as an opportunity to drop a few small feature requests. The first two have to do with the fact that NewsFire probably wasn’t designed as a way to store and reference blog posts but with its flagging feature and Spotlight indexer it is the best and most convenient tool I have for that purpose. As a consequence I like keeping a long back-history of posts in the application

1. Let me set feeds to never refresh (so I can keep the archived posts post feeds which stopped existing without having failed requests for them every time feeds are refreshed).

2. NewsFire seems to store the downloaded data in an invisible .Storage folder in Application Support. That’s not particularly Mac like. And it makes it unnecessarily hard to restore those files from backup when the Storage becomes messed up.

3. Speaking about backups: Is it really necessary that NewsFire changes the modification dates of all the downloaded feed files every time feeds are refreshed? Even if the feed didn’t change and gave a 304? Those seem unnecessary changes to me, they also make it hard to see which feeds have been ‘dead’ for a long time.

I add in a UI glitch:

4. Make the cogwheel menu active even when no feed is selected (none is selected just after the application’ launch). As it contains the ‘Refresh All Feeds’ command there’s always an active command in there when you have subscribed to feeds.

and a feature request:

5. Any chance of getting QuickLook previews for NewsFire’s files in the Spotlight index?

Many points I know, but they’ve accumulated over time.


Mattias...

Question: will NewsFire ever feature Google Reader Sync?


Tim...

Crashes on start, throws up some stack trace if run from Terminal.


Wolle...

There’s no Google Reader Sync. :(


Nick...

Looks good so far, but there’s a bit of a show-stopper with regards to bugs; The ‘Mark all feeds as read’ menu option and shortcut do not work, it seems to randomly decrement some feeds by one instead…


cmaus@mac.com...

Well, unfortunately, I stopped using NewsFire, because I read News only iPhone a lot. And because I want them to be in sync with the news feeds on my Mac, I use NetNewsWire on both my Mac and my iPhone.
So…What would be BIG for me is NetNewsWire-Sync-Support in NewsFire. Then I would be glad to use it again. It is much more beautiful than NetNewsWire.


c4software...

Hi,

in the next release, its possible to have an option to put newsFire near the clock on the top bar? and growl notification ?

Thanks.


Andreas...

Twitter integration is a great idea!

The jagged border at the top doesn’t work for me. The pattern is actually kinda distracting and doesn’t look good so I’m going back to the previous version of NewsFire for now.

One of the things that makes NewsFire so great is that you get news in a well designed but simplistic way with no-distractions.


Peter...

You only support posting to twitter, not reading, right?


Alex...

Excellent stuff!

Been waiting for Twitter integration for a while. Thanks guys!


Jeff...

The ‘mark all as read’ on New Items does not work as it should… it only marks one read at a time.

I love this program though… keep up the good work!


StormSilver...

Whew… that black bar across the top really makes it feel different. I don’t know if it’s better, worse, or just different. That “torn off” edge though… man, it’s got to go. It’s really distracting and busy.


Cristian...

Please please please, give us some sync possibility!
Or at least give us a hint on how we could export the database “as is” from one mac to a other, it would be a good start if I could export everything from my macbook to my iMac and not with the opml file.
If I only knew where Newsfire saves its data then I could use dropbox for syncing.
I really don’t want to switch from newsfire because I love it, but I really really need some way to sync it with my macbook.


Andy...

Really nice, like the little interface changes. It’s very snappy as well and so far hasn’t brough up any block messages from Flashplayer which is a big improvement….

…now about that version for the iPhone :-)


Chris...

Very nice! One thing which is a small little thing would be if you could support the graphite appearance in your sidebar highlight. So instead of blue it would show as the same gray thats in the other iApps. Thanks for the great app!


Richard...

Thank you for the update and for an elegant polished news reader application. I have tried others but nothing beats this one IMHO. Keep up the great work, it’s appreciated. :)


dck...

how much for the google reader sync?


Sebastian...

Hey, the ‘mark all feeds as read’ command is broken – it only marks the oldest item as being read.


Julian...

Thanks for the update, though I also really don’t like the new jagged border. Though at least as it comes via a PNG in the Resources folder (RoughEdge.PNG), replacing it with a 32x1px black line wasn’t too hard.


Scott...

Thanks for the update! Like some of the others, I don’t care for the jagged border or the dark bar, I prefer the old look. Otherwise enjoying the app. :)


SFBlue...

Any news on Newsfire for iPhone. I’m itching for it and don’t want to switch to NetNewsWire.


Uli...

This is great, I really, really like it in every aspect. The UI might be a little more “flashy” now, but it’s so much clearer where you are.

One feature request I second, though: Syncing with other aggregators. NewsGator won’t happen for obvious reasons (BTW: I tried it and wasn’t happy for several reasons). But syncing with Google Reader like EventBox with the fantastic NewsFire UI and Twitter posting… wow, I would be ready to shell out quite a few bucks for this.


encro...

To echo ssp’s comments regarding disabling refresh:

Never Refresh certain feeds is very useful to temporarily disable a feed without removing it.

Right-Click Copy in the WebKit View.
It’s still a major pain in the arse to work with it any other way.

NewsGator Sync. Many of us now use NetNewsWire on the iPhone and are now using the app on OS X to retain sync across platforms. I’d much prefer to switch back to NewsFire again as NetNewsWire is missing some very simple things you have got right. I don’t enjoy NetNewsWire at all but it’s a workable solution.

I like the black bar very much although the jagged edge should be reverted to something less jarring and distracting.


Ruud...

I have a habit of leaving my MBP on over the night and when I’m off to school. I was expecting NewsFire to keep updating the feeds while the screensaver is on (at least when it isn’t hibernating).

The thing is that it doesn’t. And it is really annoying with feeds that update a lot, thus I’m missing some entries.


Jim...

David,

I wonder if you would consider a slider to adjust NewsFire’s transparency when it fades to the background. I love to keep NewsFire open, but it seems, at least to me, that previous versions of NewsFire were a bit more transparent. Very nice version BTW. Thanks.


Jason...

Awesome, been waiting.


Vishal...

It would be cool if newsfire could sync with Google Reader


sadrach...

please to add sync with google reader..

Great job..


Angelo...

I’m (also) (still) a student, so I don’t always have the time to go through my RSS. This leaves my RSS a little stuffed from time to time…

Now, I’ve got the problem that it sometimes crashes, when I want to add (some) feeds… Really irritating if I say that I just had my mass of entries cleaned (thus having 0 left), they all came back in again (again 500, not knowing if they were new or not) …

Anyway, I hope the problem gets fixed :-)

Greetz,
Angelo


ruud...

Looks like it was set for version 0.22:
stops loading feeds when computer goes idle (30 minutes)
I wonder why it was added.


t_b...

NF is grate! But smart feed rules amount is steel limited by computer screen size…((


Pancho...

Add google reader sync, and we will love you for ever


Brett...

Oh Jesus when is NewsFire for iPhone coming finally?

I’m so desperately impatient!


Bram...

I hope the iPhone version comes soon, also the Safari for Windows version.


Houeida...

Dear David,
I have been using NewsFire for more than a year now, and it’s just awesome! Bravo :)

The only thing that’s really painful is that when I export my feeds collection, I lose all the groupings, and when importing the opml file I just find myself with a huge number of unorganized feeds. I once made the effort to reorganize them, but this second time I just feel it’s not the way to go. Is there a way I am missing that helps keep the feeds organized in groups while export/import from NewsFire?

Thanks


milan...

support that app menubar icon,with unread unread feeds?

I prefered menubar icon before dock.

Thank you


Milos...

i have some small ideas for a newsfire update. why i cant rate news in a newsfre? can u add that feature?


zeno...

A (former) paid user giving +1 to all the requests for some sort of syncing. MobileMe, NewsGator, Google Reader, whatever!


duyvan82...

Hi,

I think I have a GUI glitch with the latest beta release
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/8568/picture1mvg.png

I tried to reinstall Newsfire 1.5 but it didn’t fix it. Any thoughts?


Rich...

Would be nice to have some triggers and actions. For instance, email someone with a link to the post, upon incoming. Or run an Applescript. Or archive in a folder.

It would also be nice to not show duplicate urls.