NetNewsWire, the popular RSS reader for Mac, has released an alpha preview of its upcoming version 3.0. The new alpha features numerous speed enhancements, bug fixes and some nice new features including Twitterrific integration and support for microformats (screenshots after the jump).
Since the current release is an alpha, there are a number of known bugs and it's meant for developer testing only. That said, I've been using it all morning with no issues.
There's too many changes to go through in detail, but the most immediately obvious things are speed improvements. The auto-sync performed with your NewsGator account at startup is much much faster.
When opening pages in tabs they now load much faster and the tab bar has been moved off to the side, ??? la Omniweb, and provides nice thumbnail previews. The option to open feed links in your default browser is still available as well.
The Twitter support requires Twitterrific and adds a new command in the “News” menu to post the current feed item to your Twitter account.
The interface has seen a subtle makeover, folder icons are slightly different and the default colors for unread/read items have changed, but nothing too major.
Microformats support has been added to the NetNewsWire alpha, which is nice, though as even the developer admits, possibly useless.
I've never personally run across microformats data in an RSS feed, however sites like Upcoming.org (now owned by Yahoo) uses microformats for event listings so this could become useful in the future.
NetNewsWire 3 will support the hCard and hCalendar microformats.
Here's a few more highlights from the release notes:
As mentioned this is alpha software so you can expect bugs to pop up, but if you're interested in testing the new version, head over to the Ranchero site and grab a copy. Be sure to backup your NetNewsWire preferences and data before running the alpha.
A number of new options for viewing and sorting feeds
The new tab preview option
