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NetNewsWire, the popular RSS reader for Mac has release an alpha preview of its upcoming version 3.0. The new alpha features numerous enhancements, bug fixes and some nice new features including Twitterrific integration and support for microformats (screenshots after the jump).
Since the [current release][1] is an alpha, there are a number of known bugs and it's meant for developer testing only. That said, I've been using it all morning with no issues.
There's too many changes to go through in detail, but the most immediately obvious things are speed improvements. The auto-sync performed with your NewsGator account at startup is much much faster.
When opening pages in tabs they now load much faster and the tab bar has been moved off to the side, à la Omniweb, and provides nice thumbnail previews. The option to open feed links in your default browser is still available as well.
The Twitter support requires [Twitterrific][2] and adds a link in the "News" to post the current news item to your Twitter account.
The interface has seen a subtle makeover, folder icons are slightly different and the default colors for unread/read items have changed, but nothing too major.
[Microformats][5] support has been added to the NetNewsWire alpha, which is nice, though as even the developer admits, possibly useless.
I've never personally run across microformats data in an RSS feed, however sites like Upcoming.org (now [owned by Yahoo][6]) uses microformats for event listings so this could become useful in the future.
NetNewsWire 3 will support the [hCard][3] and [hCalendar][4] microformats.
Here's a few more highlights from the [release notes][1]:
>* Combined View: clicking link now marks as followed: A long-standing bug, now fixed. It will make the Attention Report accurate, but it will take a little time for that to happen (it’s not instantaneous, because it can’t know about links you clicked in the past, because the whole bug is that it didn’t know about links you clicked).
>* Feed limit now 1000: Increased the limit for the feed parser from 500 items to 1000. (There does have to be a limit, because sometimes there are runaway feeds — created by runaway scripts — that have many thousands of items in them. Erroneously. It amounts to a denial of service attack on your aggregator.)
>* Now ignoring YouTube enclosures: It will start ignoring YouTube enclosures (for new items) — since they’re just an empty player. (You can still follow the link to open the video, of course.)
As mentioned this is alpha software so you can expect bugs to pop up, but if you're interested in testing the new version, head over to the Ranchero site and [grab a copy][7]. Be sure to backup your NetNewsWire preferences and data before running the alpha.
[1]: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/changenotes/netnewswire3.0a8.php "NetNewsWire 3.0a8 Change Notes"
[2]: http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific "Twitterrific"
[3]: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard "hCard"
[4]: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar "hCalendar"
[5]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/01/tutorial_o_the__2.html "Compiler on Microformats"
[6]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/04/yahoo_placates_.html "Upcoming placates users with free t-shirts"
[7]: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/beta.php "NetNewsWire 3.0a8: Alpha Release"
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