In December I blogged about my News Aggregator epiphany when I discovered a beta version of the now nearly ubiquitous NetNewsWire Lite. Shortly after, Ranchero Software and Brent Simmons released a “pro” version of the product which includes a Notepad and Weblog Editor among other premium features — simply called NetNewsWire (NNW). I was excited about the prospect of losing my dual application dependency with BBedit and Radio (my weblog software and hosting solution).
By using NNW's weblog editor, I could read my news, write, attribute and post to my weblog in a single application. But unfortunately an early bug prevented me from downloading and posting to my Radio Categories. This week Brent and Ranchero released NetNewsWire 1.0.1b3 which includes a variety of bug fixes including my category problem.
The two posts previous to this are my first using the weblog editor built into NNW. Brent's great integration of Mac OS X's contextual menus makes it simple for me to grab URLs, HTML, HTML w/attribution, directly post, copy headlines and even launch blog content from any of my weblog subscriptions. Amazing.
I do have one issue, however. Radio has a unique feature not available on all blogging platforms: the ability to catalog a post to multiple categories. For example, this article should ideally be posted to both my On Blogs & Blogging category and my Mac My Day category. In Radio, I have the ability to click multiple caegory check boxes to utilize this feature. I also notice that the text in the weblog editor is a bit slow to react to my rapid typing, occasionally dropping characters. Of course, this is beta. But I do see a more productive blogging lifestyle. Question is, will I have more free time or WILL I simply read more blogs and post more blog entries?
UPDATE: Damn that Brent Simmons is good. I just discovered how to post to multiple categories. There is a Category “drawer” the slides out to the right of NNW's primary Weblog editor window — complete with check boxes. Yay!
