The public beta of NetNewsWire 2 is finally available. Go and get yourself a copy, and enjoy new features like (amongst many others) the in-built tabbed browser, with rendering powered by the Safari webcore. Version 2 is also a free upgrade if you’re already a registered user.
With this release, NNW’s welog editor becomes a separate application called MarsEdit. While this doesn’t have the large feature set of Ecto, I prefer the way the interface is laid out and find it much more intuitive. In my last month or so of using Movable Type (before switching to Textpattern), I was using this to write to my journal. One important feature of Ecto’s it does have is the ability to assign your own stylesheet to the preview, to get a better idea of how the article will look. Textpattern is going to include MetaWeblog support soon, so I hope to be back using this when that happens.
For this version of NetNewsWire, Brent Simmons had asked me to redesign the interface icons. A new set was created, although later on in the beta cycle these were redrawn by Bryan Bell to keep them in a family feel with MarsEdit (which had already been finished by that point). So that my icons didn’t go to waste, Brent has added a way of swapping themes via Terminal:
- Quit NetNewsWire if it’s running.
- In the Terminal, type: defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire toolbarTheme JonHicks (Hit return.)
- Launch NetNewsWire.
- To get back to the default set, step 2 should be: defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire toolbarTheme default
Here are those icons:
I’ve had a lot of requests for a write up on how I go about creating icons, so I’ve written an article, using the process from designing the NNW icons from sketches to finals as the basis. This will hopefully be published soon, more on that later.