Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

This is an exciting first few months of the year for NewsGator and RSS.  Today, NewsGator Outlook edition 2.6 beta 1 was released…see this forum post for more information.  It includes support for clippings sync (the first application in our family to include this!), podcasting (with the super-cool FeedStation), and lots more.

A couple of weeks ago, we rolled out FeedDemon 2.0 beta 1 (see Nick Bradbury’s post on the topic), with some pretty radical changes including complete sync with NewsGator Online.

And last but not least, we have internal builds of NetNewsWire that also sync with NewsGator Online; a few lucky folks got to see this live at MacWorld.  We expect to have a beta release available in the next few weeks.

The coolest part?  As of these three releases, you can use any client you want, on any platform you want - and your subscriptions and content will be seamlessly sync’d between them, and to NewsGator Online.  I’ve personally been using all three clients and the online system for quite some time now, and it’s been smooth as silk.

A quick warning - don’t install the beta of any of these products unless you understand what you’re getting into.  It’s not done - that’s why it’s a beta.  Stuff will break.  Your dog might get sick.  Your car might quit.  But if you’re up for it, give it a shot - you’ll get an early look at the future of these products, and we would LOVE to hear your feedback!

Looks like the new ACR is available, which includes support for D200 RAW files.  It’s not actually on the ACR site yet, but it’s on Adobe’s public FTP server:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/photoshop/cameraraw/win/3.x/  (windows)

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/photoshop/cameraraw/mac/3.x/ (mac)

Woo-hoo!  It was getting a little painful copying to a Mac, converting to DNG with Lightroom, back to windows, and processing using Bridge/ACR/CS2. :-)

[source: dpreview forums]

The other night, on the way home, an idea came to me…so I pulled up my development environment and decided to write some code.  I think my terrified development team is probably locking me out of the source control systems as we speak… ;-)

My thought was this.  I’m a visual person, and a lot of the feeds I subscribe to have images in the posts.  If I could see all of those images together, I could make some quick decisions about what I want to read now, vs. what I will read later.  And thus was born the image aggregator.

Take a look for yourself - click here, and use your NewsGator Online username/password.

If you’re one of those types who is completely caught up with all of your unread feeds, you won’t see anything.  But if you have unread stuff, you’ll see a compilation of all of the images in your unread posts.  If you click on one, that post will get marked as read in NG/Online, and you’ll get linked out to the post.

Here’s an example of what I see for my own account (click for larger version):

It lets me get an idea, at a glance, of what’s available to read.

This is obviously an EARLY prototype of something, which may or may not see the light of day…but I think it’s an interesting concept.  Any thoughts from you about it?  Useful or no?

Aside: this was all written using the public NewsGator Online API.

A week or so ago, we loaded a cool new feature in NewsGator Online…and I wanted to let you know about it in case you haven’t had a chance to look at it.

NewsGator Online provides a hierarchical folder stucture for you to organize your feeds, and it provides a “organize folders” function so you can arrange them how you wish.  This worked, and we actually had a lot of customers praise this “organize folders” page versus what some other tools are doing.

But now we’ve gone one better.  The way I figure it, if you just want to move a couple of feeds around, you don’t want to have to go to a whole other page…you just want to drag them around.  So now you can!  Take a look:

This shows me dragging a feed into the “NG blogs” folder.  Nothing to learn, nothing to think about…just drag it in there.  Unsubscribe, rename, and more are in the right-click menu on each feed/folder:

So anyway, take a look, and let us know what you think…we have a lot more coming for you soon!  And NewsGator Outlook edition, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire are all nearing new releases…and after using all of them over the last few weeks, I can tell you that the synchronization and usability story is awesome.  More to come!