NewsGator 1.2 is nearing release; we will again have a short, private beta program.  We’re looking for about 20 participants to help shake out this release. If you’re interested, send me a note!  In your note, please include what version of Windows you’re running, what version of Outlook, and what version of the .NET Framework you’re using (if you know).

I don’t have a final change list, but most changes focus on usability.  The following will give you an idea of what to expect:

• Email integration is now complete; in many cases, you can now “reply” to a post to email the author.
• NewsPage enhancements (excerpts, delete buttons, folders expand to show contained posts)
• Moved NewsGator menu to toolbar
• Internet Explorer toolbar button to subscribe
• Links in posts now have tooltip showing where they link to
• Fixed paint problem with progress dialog some users experienced

And several other minor changes/fixes. This will again be a free upgrade to 1.0 and 1.1 users.

I’m usually not one to just post other people’s stuff verbatim, but this post from Mark Gardner is just too cool for words:

Interesting NewsGator trick: Put all or most of your feeds into one Outlook folder, and give it a timeline view filtering out read items. What you get is a scrollable “space” containing a mixed variety of news items — scroll left and right to move around in time, and up and down to view posts within that window of time.

I find this helps me catch up on a variety of sites that I might otherwise miss from having to drill down to individual feeds, or having to scroll down through the entirety of a feed’s updates just to get to the next one. When they’re jumbled like this, yet still organized by time, I can quickly scan through looking for the latest interesting stuff.

Most other news aggregators I’ve tried don’t have the flexibility of views that Outlook+NewsGator offers. It’s true you could use a simple table view to get the now-ubiquitous three-paned interface, but that just doesn’t cut it when you start subscribing to hundreds of feeds at a time.

I love it when people show me ways to use NewsGator that I haven’t seen before. Thanks Mark!

NewsGator 1.1 has been released! This is a significant release; many of the most-requested features have been added, and a few bugs have been fixed. You can download 1.1 here. And it’s a free upgrade for licensed 1.0 users. :-)

Change list (with a few pictures):

• “From” column now shows author if present, otherwise feed name:
  
  
   
• “Received” column now shows publish date, if present, otherwise retrieve date
• Feeds which require authentication are now supported:
  
  
   
• New message notification (task tray bubble) on Windows 2000 and later
  
  
   
• Optional per-feed update frequency
• Option to determine modified-post behavior (RSS guid support), which can eliminate duplicate posts for some feeds:
  
  
   
• Initial view setup for OL2002 removed (no longer necessary)
• Subscriptions moved to separate menu item
• Subscription list now sortable
• Proxy bypass on local setting now supported
• Added category support
• Added xhtml:body support
• Confirmation when deleting subscriptions
• Added user-defined Post Author field
• Updated online help for 1.1
• Added link to tutorial on initial setup screen
• Minor GUI changes
• Trial period reset for 1.1
• Fixed problem where Outlook would not close correctly if user logged off or shut down Windows without closing Outlook
• Fixed NewsPage bug when a feed title or post title contained certain escaped HTML elements
• Fixed problem if a folder exists, but doesn’t match because case-sensitive comparison
• Fixed problem with certain feeds (such as Wired News) that vary the posts between retrievals; NewsGator now buffers at least 50 read posts (or 2x) per feed.
• Fixed problem where if publish date was specified with a north american time zone (per RFC822), NewsGator would fail to parse it and revert back to the received date
• Fixed NewsPage problem with folder names containing ‘/’, ‘ ‘, and ‘\’
• Fixed a few other minor problems

I recently received an email about the NewsGator menu in Outlook, which right now is added to the main Outlook menu bar. The person pointed out that if all add-ins added their menu to the main Outlook menu, we’d have a mess on our hands…and he suggested perhaps moving the menu to the NewsGator toolbar. SpamNet does this now – the “Cloudmark” button on their toolbar drops down their menu:

Seems like a reasonable idea, and a nice side effect would be it would eliminate the menu bug we have on Outlook 2000; but there’s something nice about just having the top-level NewsGator menu also. I’m on the fence.

What do you think?

If you’re interested in testing a beta release of NewsGator 1.1, send me a note to that effect. In your note, include the following: OS version and service pack, and Outlook version number (from Help/About). If you are an existing NewsGator customer, please indicate that fact.

I’m not going to publish a feature list yet, but if you’ve been needing support for authentication, new message notification, or per-feed update intervals, or been having problems with duplicate posts or your proxy server, you might want to sign up. There are numerous other changes and bug fixes as well.

This will be a private and limited beta; if you’re interested, get your request in soon! The beta will likely start late this week.

And finally, 1.1 will be a no-charge upgrade, so if you’re about to order 1.0, don’t hesitate!

Mike Gunderloy has a nice review of NewsGator online in his Developer Central newsletter.

There have been a couple of posts (here and here) talking about alleged security vulnerabilities in NewsGator and other news aggregators. The first post supposedly describes a way to have a news post contain an Outlook “virus” that will send an email to people in your address book; the second shows a RSS file containing script which could be annoying or malicious to a user.

I have posted a response for our customers on the NewsGator News and Updates page; the gist of this is that for the first problem to actually be a problem, you would have to manually edit your Internet Explorer security settings to loosen the restrictions. 

For the second problem, OL2002 is not vulnerable at all by default. OL2000 will actually execute the script, just as with HTML email messages, but this is easy to disable (and should indeed be disabled in most cases).

Just a reminder…if you’re using a pre-release 0.x build of NewsGator (or even the old olnews.exe), today is the last day those builds will function. I encourage you to install version 1.0 and give it a try!

If you’re using version 0.7 or later, the NewsGator 1.0 installer will upgrade your installation, and your subscriptions will remain intact. If you’re using an earlier version (before 0.7), and I know there’s a few of you :-), you will need to uninstall first before installing 1.0.

If you have upgraded to NewsGator 1.0 from a previous version, then you probably aren’t subscribed to the NewsGator News and Updates feed (new users get this subscription by default). If you’re interested in the latest news about NewsGator, I recommend you subscribe!

NewsGator users, right-click here with IE to automatically subscribe. Not using IE? Go to NewsGator/Options, and add the subscription from there.

Some good comments on NewsGator 1.0’s first day in the wild:

Joe Friend: “The best aggregator for Windows has shipped.”

Don Park: “NewsGator 1.0 is released…Integration is really smooth without apparent seams.”

Sean Varley: “It’s revolutionized the way I look at staying on top of my news, and I wouldn’t want to do it any other way now.”

Brian Graf: “NewsGator has fundamentally changed the way I keep up with the latest technology news. I endorse and recommend NewsGator unconditionally and without hesitation.”

Wes Haggard: “This is a great product! It saves me lots of time.”

Steven Hatch: “My favorite feature has always been its tight integration with Outlook.”

Thanks for the kind words, guys!