Performance enhancement: syncing could block the main thread more than it should. We moved JSON decoding to a background thread, which fixes this. This is particularly noticeable during an initial sync.

Keyboard shortcuts: the 's' key toggles starred status. The 'r' and 'u' keys now both toggle read status (instead of setting read and unread status, respectively).

Articles view: articles where the feed icon is quite large would be slow to render — now they render as fast as other articles.

Articles view: a bug where keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t work after giving the articles view focus has been fixed.

Articles view: YouTube videos could end up small. Fixed.

Articles view: fixed a bug scaling images to fit in the view.

Feedbin syncing: fixed a bug where renaming a tag on the Feedbin site would result in feeds in NNW ending up at the top level.

Help menu: fixed the expired Slack link.

Normally we wouldn’t have pushed out a new release for a single bug fix, but this one is important — we were getting false positives on app movement, which was affecting some users negatively.

Timeline: update UI more quickly when a feed icon is downloaded.

Article pane: stop blocking links containing the string “feedburner” — there are legitimate cases where that string appears.

Timeline and article pane: make sure the link for an article isn’t an empty string.

RSS parser: check for bad permalinks more aggressively. If they don’t contain a / character, then do not consider them permalinks.

Preferences > General: add checkbox to hide the unread count in the Dock.

Article pane: handle figures and iframes as we do images, so they fit in the view.

Article pane: fix white flash on first article load while in Dark Mode.

Enable the Open in Browser command only when a single article is selected.

Detect RDF (RSS 1.0) feeds that lack an XML header.

Parse Atom-style dates that are missing a T character in the middle.

About window: add link to NetNewsWire website.

RSS parser: don’t let author/title overwrite item/title.

Deleting an empty Feedbin folder no longer makes the sidebar non-responsive.

Updated the UI when a Feedbin user with an expired trial creates an account in NetNewsWire.

Feedbin syncing: fixed a bug where starred articles could appear as unread.

Microblog Mac app sharing: when it has to launch the app first, it waits a little longer before sending it content, which should fix a bug where sometimes you get no content in that case.

Fixes a bug with undoing deleting feeds or folders. The sidebar wouldn’t update afterward to show that the feed is back. Now it does.

Opens preferences window in center of screen.

Centers main window on first launch.

Preferences > Advanced now has app updating options — you can follow test builds or release builds. Release builds is the default. If you want to continue to get test builds, you’ll have to check the box next to “Test builds.”

Fixed a bug where smart feeds and folders wouldn’t re-fetch after a feed or folder was deleted, and so they might contain articles that should have been removed.

There is now a Help Book on the web. We’ll continue to update it up until we ship.

Unread counts: for the sidebar unread count, get the unread count for the selected feed/folder from the timeline.

Today feed: now shows last 24 hours. This way articles don’t just disappear at midnight. This kind of stretches the meaning of “Today,” but we think it’s fine.

Fixed a few AppleScript bugs, including a crashing bug that could happen when adding a feed that already exists.

Finalized the AppleScript scripting dictionary.

Performance: do async fetches for the timeline when an event triggers a need for a refresh. This way the main thread isn’t blocked.

Performance: reload the sidebar outline less often. Only when actually needed.

Performance: remove some unneeded drawing behind the timeline. This makes resizing the timeline horizontally faster.

Performance: make some additional database operations async that could be made so.

About box: add additional credits.

Fix typos in some error messages — they were using a foot mark instead of a curly quote.

Timeline: fixed sorting when two items have the same publication date. Added additional criteria so the sort is stable and predictable.

Timeline: small avatars (16 x 16 favicons, for instance) are now centered on a gray background. Looks a bit better.

Added How to Support NetNewsWire help menu item.

AppleScript: read/unread and starred status are now read/write via scripts.

Updated to the latest Sparkle — the thing that does these in-app version upgrades — which has better support Dark Mode. Also, it might fix a bug where Check for Updates… is sometimes not available when it should be. (Maybe.)

Status note: At this point we have no known bugs to fix before 5.0 beta. No crashing bugs. All that remains is documentation. So, please keep looking for bugs! :)

Fixed a crash that could happen when finding a feed.

Skip showing error dialogs on automatic refreshes.

Immediately show the refresh progress bar when an OPML import to Feedbin starts.

Add ellipsis to Import from OPML and Export to OPML buttons.

The Mark as Read command in the Article menu now turns into Mark as Unread at the appropriate times.

Feedbin syncing: send locally changed statuses before downloading statuses from the server.

Feedbin syncing: fix bug renaming a folder that has no feeds.

Feedbin syncing: fixed a bunch of accuracy and reliability issues, and a crashing bug.

Fixed issue where local account feed finder could lock UI in the case of an error.

Fixed a crashing bug with parsing a response from Feedbin. (Totally our fault, not Feedbin’s fault.)

Show avatars from Micro.blog feeds with multiple authors (such as your personal timeline feed).

Made OPML import to the On My Mac account way faster.

The Today smart feed now updates when the day changes.

You can now drag and drop in the sidebar between accounts.

Made the default file name for OPML exports “Subscriptions-[accountName].opml”

Add explanation text to Account preferences for the Name field. (It’s just a display name and doesn’t affect authentication.)

Fixed several bugs with Feedbin syncing — it’s now more reliable. (We know of no remaining sync bugs, though of course there might be some.)

Added a placeholder web page for the Help book.

New app icon! But it might take a while for your Mac to notice and put in the Dock. (I wish we could speed that up, but it’s out of our control.)

NetNewsWire now requires macOS 10.14.4 or greater. It no longer includes the Swift libraries, which makes for a much smaller download, which means it takes up less space on disk.

You can now sync using FeedBin. See Preferences > Accounts to add a FeedBin account. Note: the initial import from FeedBin is likely to take a while, but keeping up should be quite fast.

You can create additional “On My Mac” accounts, via Preferences > Accounts.

Accounts can be made inactive.

Sidebar: fixed a bug updating unread counts in the sidebar when you have duplicates of a feed.

Timeline: scrolling has been made faster.

Timeline: avatars are now on the left instead of on the right. There’s a default globe avatar for when no feed icon or favicon can be found. The default avatar is tinted. Each feed gets its own tint.

Detail view: worked around a new WebKit bug that affected the detail view. It would flash empty between articles sometimes. Now it won’t.

Help menu: a new command takes you to the signup page for the Slack Group.

Help menu: removed command to donate to App Camp for Girls, since the donation page has been removed. Once we know how we can continue to support their mission, we’ll do so.

OPML Export: asks for the account first.

Fixed a bug where updating changed dates in articles didn’t work.

Fixed bug fetching unread count for the Today feed — it was skipping items without a pubDate but that were logically part of Today because they arrived today.

Timeline: do ever-so-slightly less work in the cells, which should result in an imperceptible performance increase with scrolling.

Sidebar: make rows a little taller. Adds a little breathing room.

Fixed a bug where a feed’s title could get set to “Untitled” in the database — it should just be nil or empty.

Sidebar: re-sort after renaming a feed or folder.

Fixed a bug importing OPML where the OPML file doesn’t have title attributes.

Simplified user-agent to “NetNewsWire (RSS Reader; https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)”.

Sidebar: removed gear menu — the trend these days is a clean look at the bottom of the window. (See Mail and other apps.)

Sidebar: during refresh, animate in the refresh-status view. Animate out when done. (A la Mail.)

Fixed bug where the ATP feed would have empty articles. The fix was for the parser to ignore empty content:encoded elements. (This bug won’t automatically fix any already-downloaded articles in that feed. You’ll see the fix in action the next time the feed updates.)

Timeline: tightened it up. Increased information density. Uses small margins, smaller avatar, and smaller title font size.

Notarized the app, as Apple wants us to do.

Crashing bug: possible fix for the SidebarViewController.viewDidLoad() crash. (I couldn’t reproduce it. We’ll just have to watch and see if the crashes stop.)

Add feed window: fixed bug where Add button would be disabled sometimes.

Sidebar: fixed bug where empty folders would be lost between runs.

Crash reporter: close the window after sending the crash log.

Sidebar: you can drag a feed from an external app to subscribe to that feed.

Crash log catcher opens a window on next launch after a crash. It offers to send the crash log to us. (Crash logs are kept confidential.)

Wrote a privacy policy because it was needed for crash log collection. ranchero.com/netnewswire/privacypolicy

Removed the Feed Directory. The current plan is to have it return some time after 5.0 ships.

Preferences: you can set the default aggregator now.

Preferences: added Advanced pane. Right now it has just one pref — you can have crash logs sent automatically.

Added credits to About window.

Fixed bug where contextual menu for article might not have Share menu filled in properly.

Fixed bug where text in the sidebar was too gray most of the time.

Made the Star toolbar button static, because any other solution was confusing. (Show the current state? Or show the state it would have if you clicked? Both answers are good, and they’re mutually exclusive.)

Disabled inline editing in the sidebar. You can still edit feed and folder names, just not by clicking in the sidebar in just the right way. (It’s a relatively rare thing to want to do, so having text sometimes appear as editable was more confusing than useful.)

Default feeds: added Xcoders.org feed.

Enabled the hardened runtime.

Sidebar: Delete command now in contextual menu and in gear menu.

Sidebar: scrolls to show feed or folder, when needed, when going to the next unread article.

Timeline: contextual menu command to select feed in sidebar.

Detail view: fixed — at least mostly — an issue where the detail view’s web view might flash white while in dark mode.

Detail view: give URL status bar a dark background color when in Dark Mode.

Sharing: sort articles by publication date on sharing.

Sharing: set email subject when sharing to Mail.

Window title now reflects sidebar selection. (Which will only be noticeable in the Window menu, but will be meaningful when we add support for tabs.)

Dock icon menu now includes Refresh command.

Subscriptions are now stored as an OPML file instead of a plist, which means you don’t even have to export to OPML to get an OPML version of your feeds. Feed metadata is now stored in Settings.odb.

Toolbar: Mark As Read toggles back and forth between states.

Feed Directory: Add to Feeds button now works, though we want to revisit the UI.

Sidebar: feed and folder names can be edited inline.

Sharing: lightboxed the share sheet.

Sharing: added subject to Mail message.

Reduced size of download by several MB by not including Swift libraries in Safari extension.

Made the Safari extension preserve https scheme, for better security.

Added Share submenu to timeline contextual menu.

Detail view doesn’t make date a link when it would be to the same URL as the title link.

Handle bad home page URLs in a feed. (AppleInsider, for instance.)

Allow .xml as an extension when importing an OPML file.

Hide cursor when paging via the space bar.