News Explorer 1.9.7 for macOS released

[Betamagic]

Update June 12, 2019:
News Explorer has been updated to version 1.9.4 See post #19.

News Explorer is a modern, easy-to-use newsreader that runs native on all your Apple devices, with automatic iCloud based sync of all your RSS, RDF, Atom and Twitter feed subscriptions, news articles, read statuses and favorites.

Some unique features:

• Supports RSS 2.0, RDF, JSON, Atom and Twitter news feeds.
• iCloud based sync across all your Apple devices.
  
• Clean, stylish and distraction-free user interface.
• Themes and font adjustment support.
• Built-in support for saving to Instapaper and Pocket.
• Use permanent Reader view to automatically download and read the full version of articles.
• Timeline view shows your news items in an attractive newspaper-like way.
• Reply, retweet and like Tweets in Twitter feeds without leaving the app.
• Full text search.
• Built-in image viewer to browse through all images of news items.
• Enhanced support for YouTube channel subscriptions.
• Easily add news feeds based on website URL’s with RSS and Twitter Auto-discovery .
• Built-in search feature to search RSS or Twitter feeds by keywords.
• Supports feeds with Basic and Digest HTTP Authentication.
• Touch Bar support.
• Spotlight Search support.
• Handoff support, pick up where you left off.
• Notifications with images.

News Explorer product info page

The macOS version of News Explorer is available on the Mac App Store, directly on our website, including a trial version, and is part of Setapp.

Download on the Mac App Store
Download the 7-day free trial
Try Setapp for free, including News Explorer

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.5.1

This update contains the following improvements and fixes:

• Added support for YouTube channel URL’s ending with an identifier.
• Fixed a duplication issue with legacy YouTube feed data.
• Twitter feeds within OPML files are now properly imported.
• Enhanced refresh of the sidebar after Mark All as Read.
• Enhanced handling of feed icons with problematic sources.
• Last used source and target folder are now saved in the Search new feed and Add new feed dialog.
• Improved validation when adding Twitter hashtag feeds.
• The Clear command works now as intended after manually marking items as read.
• Action "Open next subscription" is now the default for setting "After marking all as read".
• Improved the performance of the Mark All as Read action in folders and smart filters.
• Improved generation of title and summary for Tweets in Twitter feeds.
• Several other bug fixes.

More info in our blog: https://betamagic.nl/blog.html

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer 1.6 for macOS now supports the new JSON Feed syndication format!
More info in our blog: https://betamagic.nl/blog.html

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.6.1, with the following fixes and improvements:

• JSON feeds in an OPML file are now correctly imported
• Fixed a bug with feeds containing duplicate items
• Fixed a bug with opening external links
• Improved support for increased contrast accessibility setting.
• Handling speed of 'Mark All as Read' has been improved
• Improved handling of items with equal identifiers belonging to different feeds
• Improved sync of Twitter metadata
• Extended date format support

https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.7, with the following new features:

New integration features

• The authentication needed to use the Twitter feed integration is now built-in. The Twitter feed engine no longer uses the shared Twitter account settings of macOS. The main reason for this change is the elimination of Twitter integration in iOS 11. We expect it will also be removed in a future version of macOS. More info on Twitter authentication in the Help page.
• The Preferences panel in the macOS edition has a new ’Sharing’ tab. This tab shows all available sharing services and gives you the possibility to configure the content of the sharing menu in News Explorer and to assign keyboard shortcuts to each individual sharing service.
• You can now share news articles with Instapaper and Pocket, the two most popular read-later services, without installing any other third-party app.
• To enable sharing with with Instapaper and Pocket in macOS edition:
  • Open the Preference panel
  • Select the Sharing tab
  • Click on the ‘Login to Instapaper’ or ‘Login to Pocket’ button.
  • Optionally assign a keyboard shortcut.
  • You can now share with Instapaper and Pocket via the share menu or by using the assigned keyboard shortcuts.
• A new ‘Add to News Explorer’ sharing extension allows you to add feeds to News Explorer directly from the sharing menu of Safari and other browsers. This works also for YouTube channels and Twitter account web pages.
• YouTube full screen playback has been improved. When you open a YouTube news item in the macOS edition, a special YouTube button is displayed in the toolbar. Clicking this button will open the YouTube video in a full screen window.
• The Add feed dialog will now also detect and handle Twitter account names and URLs.

New usability features

• You can now 'Mark Above as Read' and 'Mark Below as Read' in the articles list view and in the timeline view. These new mark commands are part of the news article context menu. You can also use the new ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ shortcut keys.
• You can now toggle between ‘Read’ and ‘Unread’ by simply pressing R on the keyboard.
• And you can now toggle between ‘Favorite’ and ‘Unfavorite’ by pressing F on the keyboard.
• In macOS, you can now move a feed to another folder by using the new ‘Move to’ context menu item. This was already possible in the iOS and tvOS editions.
• You can now toggle between all themes by pressing ⌘T.

Other new features

• The Timeline shows now also news items without an image. You can configure this in the settings via a new setting ‘Show imageless items in the Timeline view’
• The periodical iCloud cleaning is now done on a separate operation queue. This prevents endless long sync sessions when an iCloud cleaning is busy.
• Removed support for ‘Fast batch sync’. The more reliable ‘Instant item change upload’ is now the default. Other legacy sync settings are also removed. Make sure the sync priority is set to ‘Instant item change upload’ in older versions of News Explorer. This setting is automatically enforced by version 1.7, so normally you don’t have to bother about this.

System requirements
As a consequence of the mentioned technical changes, the minimum required versions for macOS has been changed to macOS 10.12.2. Synchronisation via iCloud still works with older devices running version 1.6.1 of News Explorer.

Feedback
If you encounter any difficulties with this new release, just send a message to support@betamagic.nl.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.7.1, with the following enhancements:

• Improved iCloud sync algorithm to handle data conflicts.
• The refresh button in the Timeline view acts now as a sync button.
• Improved support for context menu actions based on a clicked row.
• Added support for Modified date field in JSON feeds.
• Twitter profile images are now rendered with a higher resolution.
• Updated Readability engine.
• Redownloading a feed will now also refresh the feed icon.
• Compatibility fixes for macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
• Several other minor fixes and improvements.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8, with the following enhancements:

• Greatly improved iCloud synchronisation algorithm with semi realtime data exchange between active devices by using so called 'silent push notifications'. This should result in a more 'automatic' sync experience with less need to manual interventions.
  
• Read items are now displayed with 50% transparency, which makes it a lot easier to distinguish them from unread news items. The default transparency level can be changed in the Preferences.
  
• The article viewer will now show the external link of a news article, when available. Feeds like Daring Fireball (the JSON edition) and Drudge Report contain links to the original source article which are different from the link to the articles themselves.
  
• When an article contains an external link, it will be used to generate the Reader view. Unless this is disabled in the settings.
  
• The news item list is now more dynamic and animated.
  
• New downloaded items are now immediately visible in the news item list.
  
• Most user settings are now saved in a different way, to prevent issues in especially macOS 10.13.

More info can be found on the special blog page or product page.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8.2, with the following fixes and enhancements:

• The instant iCloud sync algorithm as introduced in version 1.8, has been tweaked to cover more complex synchronisation scenarios.
• The Twitter options has been extended with a new Download likes option. When enabled, all tweets that were liked by the account of the Twitter feed, will be downloaded in addition to the other tweets.
• Some feeds use links that are relative to the website internet address, like /pages/1234 instead of http://example.com/pages/1234. These links didn't work in News Explorer in the previous versions. This has been fixed and should work with RSS and Atom feeds.
• A bug with the Use iCloud synchronization setting has been fixed. Changed settings were not saved when iCloud synchronization was disabled, including the said setting.
• Version 1.8.2 adds a fix for using News Explorer for macOS and iOS without iCloud synchronization. This fix does not apply to the tvOS version, which for now remains on version 1.8.1.

More info can be found on the special blog page or product page.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8.3

New options

• Added a new option Auto fix invalid feeds. When enabled, News Explorer will try to parse feeds that are normally rejected. This takes more time and processor power, and is therefore default disabled. The current implementation is limited to parsing invalid configured Wordpress feeds.
• Added VoiceOver options Skip feed titles and Skip article dates to skip feed and time info in the articles list, to speed up processing long lists.

Improvements

• The URL context menu in the article viewer has been improved and extended. You can now directly copy, open, preload and share any link within every article, including the built-in sharing to Instapaper and Pocket.
• The image extraction algorithm has been improved and extended.
• The built-in Readability engine has been updated.
• The poster image returned by the Mercury engine is now displayed, when available and applicable.

Fixes

• Fixed and improved rendering of code within <pre> and <code> html tags.
• Fixed some other article rendering issues as well, mostly related to images.

More info can be found on the special blog page or product page.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Very nice app. Purchased the Mac & iOS versions.

 

[Weaselboy]

Do you have any plans to add Feedly sync as an option?

 

[Betamagic]

No, but maybe in a future release as an extra sync option. News Explorer uses it's own built-in sync mechanism based on iCloud.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8.4

New options:

• A new setting Article width has been added to Viewer settings in the Preferences panel. With this, you can adjust the maximum width of the article in the standard article viewer.
• Added support for Smart zoom in the article viewer. To use this, you must enable 'Smart zoom' in the Mouse or Trackpad settings in System Preferences of macOS.

Improvements:

• Improved navigation with the space bar key. With the space bar key you kan easily navigate from article to article, with automatic scrolling of articles when needed. The improved navigation concerns automatic opening of the first article in the next feed list when you have reached the last article in the current feed.
• The image extraction engine supports now urls with query parameters. In the previous version, the query parameters were ommitted, which sometimes resulted in 'Invalid images'.
• Images based on relative links are now properly displayed. The previous version only showed a dreaded question mark icon for this kind of images.
• Improved support for feeds without unique article identifiers.
• Improved support for opening relative links in articles.

Fixes:

• Fixed a full-screen bug when using the System theme.
• Fixed a bug with unfavouriting an article with an active Favorites filter.
• Fixed a bug with disappearing read items during a sync session.
• Fixed non-working 'Clicking article title' setting.

More info can be found on the special blog page or product page.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8.8

New features

• The Preferences panel has been reorganised, and contains now a new Behaviors tab. This tab adds a lot of new behavior settings, like what the app should do when you double-cick an item in the article list, and lots more.
• You can now search for news articles in News Explorer via Spotlight Search. The Preferencs panel contains some new settings, to disable the indexing, to include thumbnails, and to delete the Spotlight News Explorer items. You need macOS 10.13.4 or newer to use this new feature.
• The Sidebar has been strongly improved:
  • Collapsed folders do now show an unread counter badge.
  • The collapsed or expanded state of each folder is now being stored.
  • Feed icons can now be changed, via the feed context menu.
  • Added support for the system sidebar icon size setting.
• The in-app browser features now Subpixel anti-aliasing, which results in easier to read text with more contrast, especially with modern thin fonts. You can fall back to the standard grayscale anti-aliasing by adjusting a setting in the Reading tab of the Preferences panel.

• The said Reading tab contains the following new In-app browser settings:
  • Enable Javascript
  • Enable private in-app browsing
  • Enable plug-ins
  In addition to this, you can clear the cache of the in-app browser.
• Implemented Next and Previous menu items for articles, with short cuts J and K. So now we have three ways to navigate in the article list with the keyboard: by using the said new short cut keys, by using the spacebar key, and by simply using the arrow keys.
• All YouTube videos in News Explorer can now be opened in full window size. Or full screen if you maximize News Explorer to full screen. This behavior can be adjusted in the Reading tab. This feature is experimental and requires macOS 10.13.
• The Advanced tab of the Preferences panel contains the following new settings:
  • Cancel sync when quitting the app. You should only enable this when News Explorer blocks the shutdown process of your Mac.
  • Block updates during feed downloads. This setting is always active when you 199 feeds or more.
  • Limit interface updates during sync. This is automatically active when you have more than 99 feeds. It pauses updates of the sidebar and article list during high processor usage.
• A Folder Manager has been added, accessible via the Window menu. The current functionality is limited to deleting unused folders.

Improvements

• Added support for bookmark links. These are links that scroll to a certain location within a page, after opening a webpage.
• Adjusting the width of the article list will now correctly resize the height of the table view cells.
• An activity indicator is now visible in the toolbar during rendering of the Reader view.
• Improved persistence of the last selected folder in the Add new feed dialog
• Handling of left arrow key in the in-app web browser has been changed, to prevent closing the page when an input control has the focus.

Fixes

• Correction of incorrectly encoded feeds has been enhanced. Especially feeds with cyrillic and other non-ascii characters will benefit from this.
• Dates in feeds with two digit year numbers are now correctly processed.
• Support for RDF feeds has been enhanced. Especially some scientific feeds will benefit from this.
• Feeds with too many white spaces around URLs and other fields are now also correctly processed.
• Fixed a printing issue which resulted sometimes in an empty output, especially with long complex pages.
• A crash after exporting to PDF from out the Print dialog has been solved.
• Fixed the ‘Download replies’ Twitter setting

More info can be found on the special blog page or product page.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8.10

Article list improvements

• The article list now supports thumbnail display! You can even adjust the image size and alignment.
• Thumbnail retrieval of feed articles has been further improved and extended.
• The number of preview lines and the font size are now also adjustable.
• New context menu item to copy the URL of the selected article.

Article viewer improvements

• The article viewer now supports an adjustable title font weight and size, plus optional display of the separator line under the title.
• Based on this, the article viewer now uses a more modern bold font as title header. This can be reversed in the Preferences panel.
• When you hover over a link in the article viewer, a status bar line is shown with the target URL.
• Improved support for podcast feeds, with display of audio controls for attached audio files.

Mojave compatibility

• Added support for macOS 10.14 Mojave’s Dark mode and Accent colors, as part of the System theme.
• Several other macOS 10.14 compatibility improvements, mostly cosmetic.

More info can be found on the special blog page or product page.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.8.14.

New features

• You can now open articles in separate windows or tabs, to read them with full focus. This happens default when you double-click on a selected item in the article list, or by pressing Enter on the keyboard.
• New windows can be combined or added to one tabbed window. You can also choose to open the window in full-screen, for even more focus.
• The main Touch Bar has been extended with a settings button, which opens a dedicated settings bar to change article list settings like thumbnail size and alignment.
• You can now share directly to Twitter, without dependency on third party apps. This is especially important for Mojave users, because macOS 10.14 no longer has built-in Twitter support.

Improvements

• Support for Mojave, including Dark Mode, Accent colors and other visual details, has been improved and tweaked. When the System theme is selected, the app will automatically follow the Dark Mode and Accent color settings of macOS.
• After loading images in the article viewer, the images are resized to max width if possible, or hidden when they are too small, like social media buttons or tracking images.

Fixes

• Implemented a temporary fix for the ‘Add to Reading List’ bug in Mojave.

Far more info about this update can be found on the special blog page, general product info can be found here.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I enjoy your app. Thanks again for the hard work and updates.

Will you be adding Siri Shortcut ability to the app? Would be nice to have the ability to open the app, as well as have Siri read specific daily subscriptions.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.9

The most important new features are:

• Permanent Reader view, as feed level setting.
• Strongly improved Mercury Reader and Arc90 Readability engines.
• A new Poster article list view, with adjustable image size.
• Improved support for Mojave Dark Mode and Accent Colors.
• Support for articles with RTL languages.
• Unlimited storage periods for unread and read items.

Read the special blog page to see what else has been added and improved: https://betamagic.nl/news/2019/2019_05.html

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.9.4

The main new feature concerns 26 new fonts for the article viewer. These fonts are selected from the Google Fonts collection, based on readability and good design. Furthermore you can now combine serif body fonts with sans serif article titles and/or article headers.

Some other changes in this update are:

• Improved support for titleless microblog articles.
• Added support for running cookieless YouTube videos in fullscreen.
• Articles opened in a separate window can now also be printed.

More info can be found in this blog article: https://betamagic.nl/news/2019/2019_06.html

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.9.6.

This update contains the following improvements:

• Multiple Catalina compatibility improvements, including fixes for Auto Dark Mode.
• YouTube playlist support.
• Implemented a warning for insufficient iCloud storage space.
• Added confirmation dialog when importing more than 20 feeds.
• Added support for application logging.

 

[Betamagic]

News Explorer for macOS has been updated to version 1.9.7.

This update contains the following improvements:

• Improved parsing and display of video podcasts.
• While syncing, a nice status bar with progress information is being displayed.
• Added an 'Import OPML File' action to the sidebar plus button menu.
• Fixed non-working sync interval.

The Share menu has been extended with the following menu items:

• ’Open in Safari’ and other popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Brave.
• ‘Copy Link’, copies the current article link to the clipboard.

A complete change list can be found here: https://betamagic.nl/news/2019/2019_09.html