Authorization

You will need to authorize Feeder to post to Facebook again for two reasons: Facebook has changed their authorization scheme and Feeder needs to be granted new permissions to work with your groups on Facebook. If you don’t reauthorize Facebook, your posts won’t be sent to Facebook when publishing.

To reauthorize Feeder:

• Show the Info view by choosing View > Show Feed Info from the menu.
• Click Settings and then choose Announcements
• Click the Change button next to your Facebook account name
• Log in to Facebook and follow the prompts

Posting to a Group or Page

Once authorized, there’s new a pop-up menu in Feeder’s Announcements view for choosing where to post, which will list any Facebook pages you administer and all the groups to which you belong (it’s not possible for Feeder to determine which groups you administer).

The list is only retrieved when you first authorize Feeder, so if you create a new group or page, choose Refresh from the pop-up menu to update the list. If you only want to post to your wall as before, you can just leave this as “Profile Wall”.

When posting to a group, the post will appear to come from you. When posting to a page, the post will use the page name instead.

Better Thumbnails

Another improvement is that Feeder will now try to use a thumbnail from the item you’re announcing. If you’re using the Media RSS extension, Feeder will send the Thumbnail URL. If not, it’ll use the first image it finds in your post, if any. If it can’t find an image, Facebook will do its regular thing of choosing one from the corresponding web page.

Publishing and Announcements

Feeder can now publish feeds using WebDAV, which could previously only be accomplished by connecting to the server as a disk in the Finder and publishing using File Export. The same system is being used to publish to iDisks now too.

Feeder 2.1 also dramatically improves the experience of authorizing Twitter accounts, thanks entirely to Twitter implementing xAuth, an alternative to OAuth for desktop and mobile apps that removes the need to use a web browser to authenticate and authorize applications. This not only makes it much easier to authenticate with Twitter, but also to use different accounts for different feeds, as you no longer need to log out of one Twitter account on the web to authorize another.

64-bit and Snow Leopard

Feeder now runs as a 64-bit application on Snow Leopard. While this is not something you should notice, it will become more important once all your applications make the transition to 64-bit, as the Mac OS X will no longer need to load its 32-bit versions of everything, improving performance and saving memory. Feeder will also use QuickTime X on Snow Leopard when working with audio and video files.

Podcasting

Feeder’s iTunes preview has now been updated to match the recent changes at the iTunes Store and adds customizable colors for iTunes U feeds. Feeder is now also using a completely different third-party framework for tagging MP3 files, which should improve both the reliability of Feeder and compatibility of the audio files.

More

In addition to the above, there are many more tweaks and changes in this release, including drag and drop Sparkle appcasts (drag an application to create a zip file and fill out the version numbers, etc), gestures to zoom the preview, navigate the list and switch editing modes and more.

To see full list of changes and download the latest version, see the Feeder Release Notes page.

Feeder 2.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later, costs $39.95 and is a free upgrade for all registered Feeder 2.0 users. Feeder 1.x users can upgrade for $14.95.

At the time of writing, it includes the wares of over 80 independent software developers, including Reinvented Software, but more are being added all the time. So, to get 20% off the full price of Together, Feeder or anything else you’ve been fancying on the list, then go to the One Finger Discount page to find out how.

You may notice that the Services menu has been cleaned up in Snow Leopard and this affects Together users. You can now choose which items to show and set shortcut keystrokes for the Services menu in System Preferences. Unlike the mess of before, Snow Leopard only shows the services that are relevant to the current selection.

An additional enhancement is that items in the Services menu now appear in contextual menus. This is intended to replace contextual menu plugins across the system, as those will not work with 64-bit applications.

Speaking of which, I plan to make both Feeder and Together 64-bit applications on their next major release (Feeder 2.1 and Together 2.3). Together will be released first and Feeder will follow. Feeder is much more reliant on a number of third-party components than Together, so that transition will take longer.

I plan to take advantage of more Snow Leopard technology in my apps in due course, while retaining Leopard compatibility for a while.

I’ve been using Snow Leopard for a while now and my favorite enhancement has got to be the improved Exposé, especially the way an app is put under the spotlight when dragging to its Dock icon. I think Snow Leopard is my favorite release of Mac OS X since 10.3 Panther. Big headline features are great, but a focus on thoughtful enhancements and improved performance always seems to make me smile.

So, if you’re installing it today, I’d like to wish you a happy Snow Leopard day!

New User Interface

Feeder 2.0 has been redesigned to make working with feeds easier from start to finish. The toolbar is now less cluttered and shows a typical workflow, while the contents of Feeder’s Info drawer, which manages attributes and settings that applied to the feed as a whole, has moved to the main window.

The drawer approach worked well in the initial versions of Feeder, but didn’t scale very well as support for more RSS extensions was added. For new users, the Info drawer could appear intimidating with its sometimes cramped layout and small text, despite most of it being entirely optional.

Now, clicking the Info button below the source list shows a list of RSS extensions and choosing one of these will show all the details for that extension that apply to the feed as a whole. There’s another section for Settings that works the same way, but for things not stored in the feed itself. To get back to editing items, click on the feed or hide the Info view. The new Info sections are also searchable, both for field names and their values.

Editing & Templates

Editing items in Feeder has been improved in a number of ways. HTML syntax coloring has been improved and Feeder will now only check the spelling of the actual content rather than any HTML tags. The Insert Image panel now uses CSS styles to align and add decoration to the image and you can drag and drop files to the description area to immediately upload them to the web and insert the appropriate HTML image or link tags.

Feeder’s templates are now much more accessible. Feeds are based on templates, which determine which RSS extensions should be used, which fields to show in the editor and can also contain default values for things such as an author name or boilerplate text for the description.

In Feeder 2.0 choosing a template is the first step in creating a new feed and the template editor, which was once a panel that was probably ignored by most people, is now integrated into the item editor. By clicking the Template button, the editor switches to Template mode where you will see a list of extensions and all the fields for the selected extension. Click the checkbox next to a field to show it in the editor and set default values in the field itself.

Preview

Feeder has always shown a preview of how your feed should look when viewed in a typical feed reader. Feeder 2.0 improves on this with the new portrait preview, which shows the list of items on the left and the preview to the right. This is how people will read posts on a web page and in most cases eliminates the need to scroll when checking your feed. The new preview style is much cleaner than before, too.

Post to Weblog

Many podcasters use Feeder to complement their existing weblog. Most blogging software has fairly limited support for podcasts, so Feeder gives full control over the feed, Apple’s iTunes RSS extensions and can automatically add the appropriate artwork and other ID3 (or equivalent) tags to media files before uploading everything to the web.

However, using Feeder in tandem with a blog was, at best, a clunky experience. You could post to the blog first, reload the blog’s feed in Feeder and drag the new post to your podcast feed, or publish with Feeder first, then manually copy the details into a blog post.

Either method has compromises. By posting to the blog first, you won’t be able to use Feeder to tag and upload the media files and the alternate approach is an exercise in cut and paste.

With Feeder 2.0, this problem is solved. You can create your episode in Feeder and in one click, upload the feed, media files and send the post to your blog. Feeder will also update posts that it has previously published. Feeder supports WordPress, Blogger and Drupal, the most popular weblogs for podcasters, but others should work too.

Announcements

Many people use Twitter and Facebook to announce new posts, so it seems fitting that Feeder should be able to do this for you too. After publishing, Feeder can post updates on Twitter and Facebook for the newly published content in your feed.

Amazon S3 Uploading

Amazon S3 is becoming a popular choice among those who want an affordable and dependable way to host large files. Feeder 2.0 now includes full support for publishing to Amazon S3 and working with S3 servers, including bucket and folder creation.

Share Panel

It can be difficult to know what to do with a feed after publishing it and this was not covered much in Feeder before. For example, most modern web browsers will auto-detect the presence of an RSS feed on a web page using a special HTML tag, but unless you know about that, you will be mystified.

In Feeder 2.0 things such as that are available in the Share panel, which Feeder can show after publishing a feed for the first time, and can be seen at any time by clicking the Share button in the toolbar.

And much more!

These are the highlights of the new features in Feeder 2.0 but just about every part of the app has been tweaked, polished and modernized. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Feeder 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later and costs $39. Feeder 1.x users can upgrade for $14.95 and anyone who purchased Feeder in the last 6 months qualifies for a free upgrade.

You can hear Allison give the tutorial on PoP Episode #9 (enhanced podcast) and read it on her site: Feeder Tutorial.

The Podcasting on Podcasting (PoP) series should prove very useful to budding podcasters as the entire process can be very daunting, as it covers everything from the technical side of recording equipment, software and web hosting on the one hand, and the creative aspect on the other, not to mention considerations such as time and family commitments.

Allison’s been podcasting for a long time now, and occasionally brings in other experienced contributors such as Don McAllister of the excellent ScreenCastsOnline.

The Podcasting on Podcasting series can be found as part of Allison’s main podcast, NosillaCast, at podfeet.com. Allison also contributes to the Mac Roundtable Podcast and the Mac ReviewCast.

Link: Scripting Sparkle Appcasts with Feeder and RubyCocoa

Link: The AppleScript Studio Workshop – Adding a Check Updates Feature

User Interface

Firstly, the user interface has been updated for 10.5 Leopard, and because Feeder’s minimum system requirements are now for 10.4 and later, gets some new controls such as date pickers and token fields for things like iTunes keywords.

Feeder has worked fine on Leopard since the big cat’s release, but Leopard’s darker theme almost eradicated the subtle borders on some toolbar icons and the increased contrast made some of the colours appear too saturated. Also, the sidebar gets Leopard gradient and colours, and turns grey when the main window is inactive. These are minor changes but make a big difference.

Podcasting

Feeder’s podcasting support has been improved in particular for video podcasters. Video podcasts can now have thumbnails via Yahoo’s Media RSS extension. These thumbnails are used for video search results and application such as Miro (formerly Democracy Player).

Using the Media RSS extensions is as straightforward as checking “Use Media Extensions” in the Extensions section of the Info drawer (below the iTunes extensions, if you’re using them). That will show the Media Thumbnail field in the editor, where you can drag an image file to upload or specify the URL of an image that is already online.

Finally for video podcasters, this version improves performance when reading and tagging MP4 files, including those used for iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, etc.

Publishing

Another change useful for any podcaster is that Feeder now has the ability to redirect uploaded enclosure URLs through a site. This is useful for podcast sites concerned with statistics such as Blubrry. You can find the settings for this in the Enclosures section under Settings in the Info drawer.

Feeder’s publishing is now improved to (finally!) support password-less SFTP. This can be enabled by clicking the Options button in the Servers window for an SFTP server. It also allows the creation of additional servers for enclosures and images during publishing setup.

Sparkle

Last but not least, Sparkle appcasting support has been improved. It is now possible for Feeder to automatically generate MD5 sums and DSA signatures for enclosure files. The settings for these can be found in the Sparkle section under Extensions in the Info drawer. Finally, Feeder’s AppleScript has been improved and now includes the ability to edit Sparkle attributes.

Summary

Most Feeder releases have an overall theme and in this case it’s mostly about video podcasting, but also about further refining it in its current form. Feeder is a pretty mature product now and actually celebrates its 3rd birthday tomorrow. I have plenty of ideas and plans for Feeder for the next year, so stay tuned!