I’m very pleased to announce the release of NewsGator 1.0!

At the same time comes the public debut of NewsGator’s new home, http://www.newsgator.com. There you’ll find lots of information about NewsGator, news, downloads, a RSS feed search system, support resources (including a knowledge base and discussion forums), and of course the NewsGator store.

This has been an interesting development cycle…all the way from the first concept screen shot right here on my weblog, to where we are today with version 1.0. I’d like to publicly thank all of those who have been working with the 0.x versions, and especially those folks who volunteered to thoroughly test the RC1 release. Thanks to all of your efforts, I think NewsGator 1.0 is a great product!

There are numerous changes since the last release. I encourage you to download version 1.0 and try it…and if you like it, spread the word!

Press release

The countdown continues!

3…2…1…

If you are interested in testing a NewsGator release candidate, please let me know. This will be a very limited release, and we will only be taking a limited number of requests.

When you respond, please include the following information:

• Operating System and SP
• .NET version and SP
• Outlook version
• Are you currently using NewsGator?
• Number of subscriptions in NewsGator

You will hear back from me within a couple of days if you are selected. Thanks!

UPDATE: wow, what a response. We have enough people now; if you responded, you should be hearing back soon.

NewsGator v0.9 is now available on the download site. A couple of items that have gotten a lot of attention lately have been changed – NewsGator no longer sends a referrer header, and it now correctly installs and operates for non-admin users. Other changes:

• Posts now marked as read after reading from NewsPage
• NewsGator can now be correctly loaded/unloaded from the Outlook Tools/Options/Other/Advanced/COM Add-ins dialog, including adding/removing all GUI elements. Solves problem of multiple NewsGator menus in certain circumstances.
• Added link for post comments
• Fixed bug on NewsPage when a feed title had an embedded ‘/’ character
• Fixed problem where if logged in twice via terminal services, would get two copies of each post
• When trigger a manual retrieve, reschedule auto retrieve time
• Added keyboard shortcuts
• IE context menu can now be switched on and off from NewsGator Options, rather than being an install-time selection.
• Added start menu folder
• Fixed problem where if NewsGator started up but no folders were accessible, Select Folder… wouldn’t work and you’d be in a situation you couldn’t get out of
• Fixed problem where under certain rare conditions, retrieving a feed might never timeout

If you run into any problems, or have any new suggestions, please let me know!

Sorry folks…I made a little mistake, and evidently didn’t test a couple of bug fixes against each other. With certain feeds, the old 0.8.4 (actually 0.8.4.1) would fail to retrieve, and the status window would just sit there and stare at you.

I built a new version, and the download links have been updated. If you have installed 0.8.4 already (there’s quite a few of you), check the version (Newsgator menu, About). If you are running 0.8.4.1, please go to the download site and install the updated one, which is 0.8.4.2.

Sorry about this…and thanks to Adam for pointing it out so quickly.

Well, there wasn’t going to be another release before 0.9, but there were enough changes piling up that I wanted to get them out for people to use. So, you can now download v0.8.4 from the NewsGator site.

Users who are using the public 0.7 or 0.8 builds can just install 0.8.4 over them. If you are using a private build that you obtained directly from me, you need to uninstall it before installing this new version.

Changes:

• NewsPage recent posts now link to the specific message instead of the entire folder
• NewsPage will now show posts in the base news folder
• Added refresh button to NewsPage
• Feeds now alphabetized when retrieving
• Subscription URL’s now displayed in edit dialog
• Added a “default location for new subscriptions”, which is also used by context menu
• Visual indication when articles are read from the NewsPage
• NewsPage performance improvement for those with lots of read messages in news folders. Performance when all messages are unread is comparable to previous version.
• Allow multi-select on feeds when editing folder names
• Separated online/offline settings with check news interval
• Fixed some NewsPage problems experienced by a few users
• Fixed problem where if NG was launched other than at startup time (such as selecting the Add-in from tools/options), it would not properly initialize, and could sometimes crash
• Fixed problem when there were no feeds in the list
• Fixed problem where NG would not retrieve news again after encountering a RSS feed without a title
• Double click on subscription list now opens subscription for editing
• Progress dialog now has minimum size
• Minor adjustments to improve GUI interaction when retrieving many new feeds at once

There have been problems with the NewsGator 0.8 installation where the .NET Framework would sometimes be downloaded and installed even if it was already present. There is now a new installer on the download site, which you can use if you already have the .NET Framework installed.

The problem seems to be in the detection code, which is of course under the complete control of my installer vendor. Hopefully we’ll be able to narrow this one down and get it fixed!

A big thanks to all who have been helping with this problem.

Another huge release, this one pretty much feature complete for v1. You can read the release notes on the download site, but here’s a couple of things to wet your appetite:

• Added “NewsPage” HTML view of news:

  

• Added Internet Explorer context menu to right-click on RSS link and add to NewsGator:

  

• Can now adjust retrieval performance vs. resources used; average retrieval performance now drastically faster:

  

• Now supports using IE proxy settings, and proxy credentials
• Added automatic .NET Framework installation to installer

And a whole host of other items as well. Go take a look!

This is a huge milestone for NewsGator…it is getting fairly close to feature-complete for v1.

Here’s a rundown of what’s changed:

• Posts without titles will now show an excerpt from the post instead of a blank title.
• There is now a busy notification icon in the task bar when NewsGator is retrieving news.
• New status dialog, which shows which feeds NewsGator has retrieved, which feeds had errors, and which ones are in process. Status dialog can be displayed from the NewsGator menu, or from the busy notification icon (double click or use context menu).
• Retrieve news process can now be cancelled from the status dialog.
• You can now select a folder name for each feed independently.
• Added capability to import from OCS files, which allows importing NewzCrawler subscriptions.
• Added capability to export a OPML subscription file.
• New columns have been added in Outlook for feed name and publish date.  You can access them by looking at the list of user-defined fields in a folder containing news items.
• Fixed problem that could occur when a feed was missing a title.
• Cache directory has been moved to the intended location.
• Fixed a problem when you added a feed while a news retrieval was in progress, and the new feed would disappear from the list.
• Changed NewsGator menu shortcut so as not to conflict with “New” button on default toolbar.

Some of the new features, used together, enable some pretty cool things. Here’s an example of a single-folder view of news, but still separated by feed (click for larger version):

Version 0.7 is available for download here. Note that you must un-install previous versions before installing 0.7. You will not lose your subscriptions by doing this.

Also, I have gotten a LOT of questions about the future of NewsGator. Here’s the official word. NewsGator will become a commercial product as of version 1.0. Pricing has not yet been determined, and will be announced just prior to launch. Current builds will expire on Feb 28, 2003, and users will need to upgrade to a current version at that time.

As always, comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome!

We’ve enabled titles, which means that you’ll now have to refer to me as the 4th Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale. :)

Actually, it’s because NewsGator rocks, but only if you are using titles. [Sean ‘Early’ Campbell & Scott ‘Adopter’ Swigart’s Radio Weblog]

Just thought I’d mention…current (private) builds of NewsGator work much better than before with un-titled posts; it will show an excerpt from the post if there is no title.

A new release should be available in the next week or so – there is a lot of great new stuff!