Feeder 2.0 is available today. This version adds many significant new features and enhancements including weblog integration, announcements, editing and preview improvements, live validation, Amazon S3 uploading, iTunes U support and an updated, improved user interface.

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.

Potion Factory has released a public preview of The Hit List today. The Hit List is a brand new task management app that takes a welcome departure from current offerings, combining simplicity and power in a polished user interface that never ceases to delight. While based around the concepts behind the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology, The Hit List won’t impose a system on you and there is no requirement to understand any of those things.

The Hit List is, as the name suggests, based around lists. You can create separate lists for each set of tasks you need to manage, whether a work project, plan for a trip or anything, really. There are also some special lists such as Inbox, for collecting tasks, and Today and Upcoming to keep track of tasks, and you can create smart folders too. Lists are in outline form, a perfect way to organize your thoughts, with each task an item in the list. Tasks can have start and due dates, estimated times, tags, notes and attachments and can be organized into folders.

For me, what makes The Hit List stand out is how straightforward it is to use. Hit Return to create a task, and start typing. Tags are inline, prefixed by the / character, and appear as highlighted text. Context tags start with the @ character. The Hit List can also predict tags as you type.

Typing is a big part of The Hit List, and almost everything to do with creating and working with tasks can be accomplished with a number of single-character shortcut keys, such as T for today or F to file tasks. And if you’re wondering how you would ever remember all this, a Hints bar is shown along the bottom of the list and changes depending on the context. Of course, you can accomplish everything with the mouse too.

Add to this the tabbed interface, a tag browser, where tags can be organized into bundles, a contextual tag filter and cleverly implemented iCal sync and this app appears to want for nothing. Well, apart from an iPhone version, which is planned. And that’s the amazing thing: this app is feature packed, but to just look at it, you would never realize. The Hit List strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and power.

While public preview continues, you do not need a license to buy The Hit List, but at the time of writing, you can for a special price of $49.95. The normal price will be $69.95. The Hit List requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

Normally, I only write about Mac software I’ve had the opportunity to beta test, but with The Hit List, while that is true, the story is somewhat different. Potion Factory developer Andy Kim is a very good friend of mine, and I have watched him sculpt this application for well over a year now. I know and appreciate the time and effort he has invested in every detail, and I have looked forward to the day when he shows it to the world.

Congratulations to Andy on this release and if you’re interested in a task management application that doesn’t leave you dumbfounded, check out The Hit List from Potion Factory without delay.

Link: The Hit List Public Preview

Together 2.2.4 introduces a very small, but potentially quite useful feature addition following a feature request. You can now send a Together item link for the selected item in the list (or the item in the current tab) to another application using the Services menu.

To give a practical example, OmniFocus‘s Clipping feature allows you to set a keystroke that can be used to import the current selection into OmniFocus. For most applications, it achieves this using the Services menu.

As of Together 2.2.4, when an item is selected in Together and OmniFocus’s clipping service is used, whether through the keystroke or Services menu, OmniFocus will create a new task with the Together item link in the tasks’s notes. Clicking the item link will open the original item in a tab in Together.

As I mentioned, this is using Mac OS X’s system services, it’s not an OmniFocus-only tip, so you may be able to find a use for this in other apps, too.

This time last year, Give Good Food to your Mac’s kitchen opened for the first time, presenting allowing you to cook up your own bundle of Mac apps by choosing the ones that suited you the best, and the more apps you bought the more you saved with a progressive discount rate. In the summer, there was a developer special.

Today, the promotion is back for another fortnight. While the recipe is the same, you can now choose from around 70 apps from independent developers across the globe. Together is included in this promotion. Discounts start at 20% when you buy three or more apps and rise to 50% for five or more apps. The promotion runs from Nov 17th to Nov 30th.

So, to create your own bargain bundle, head over to the Give Good Food to your Mac store.

Together 2.2 is available today, bringing improvements to tagging, groups, item categorization, tabs, the Shelf, imports and previews. Here’s a summary of the main changes:

Tagging

Together 2.2 introduces intelligent auto-tagging based on items with similar content. When items are imported or saved, Together will analyse their content and tag them based on other items with the same tag.

Also in 2.2, tags can be organized into bundles, and system tags (which show things such as labels, ratings and groups as though they were tags) are also shown in their own bundles. It’s now possible to show items that have all the selected tags in the tag browser, rather than any of the tags.

The new Change Tags panel replaces the Add Tags panel to add or remove specific tags from multiple items or all items in a group. This is useful as is not possible to edit specific tags in the Info view when multiple items are selected and not all items have the same tags.

Items

Together 2.2 adds a new Web Page group to show all web archives, web pages and PDFs of web pages, whether printed from a browser or web PDFs created by Together.

Items’ file creation and modification dates can be edited in the Info view by clicking on the date.

Tabs for items can now be rearranged and will scroll horizontally when there are too many to be displayed in the main window.

Web PDFs have also been improved so that you can specify the minimum size for a web page when creating a PDF in Together, with default settings in Together’s Previews preferences panel that will be used when PDFs are imported from dragged URLs.

Also, the content for notes and text documents can now be zoomed and the default zoom percentage can be set in Previews preferences.

Groups

Groups and smart groups can now be nested in folders. Items can be added to new or existings groups and moved to folders using the Items menu.

Shelf

Together 2.1 added the ability for the Shelf to show options when importing. This is now improved so that, in the case of single-item imports, you can edit the name of the item being imported.

Also, Together will return to the previous application after the Shelf closes and there is a new “Find in Library” hot key to open the Shelf with the search field selected.

Importing

Together now has better handling of file promises. Sometimes when dragging from other applications, the other application is responsibile for creating the file in Together’s library, but Together would only know when that process started and so would show the new item in the library before the copy had completed. This could cause some confusion for larger files, so now Together will wait until the file has been fully copied to a temporary location.

This change also works around a problem where Mail.app will silently overwrite exported email files with the same subject, as Together now has control over the name of the imported file.

There are plenty of other smaller improvements and tweaks in this version. See the Together release notes page for a full list.