Newzie is getting closer to the Version One. Now it is at 0.99.8. Before preparing this release, we got lots of feedbacks from our users; suggestions, bug reports and many many thank-you messages. First of all, we like to thank all of our users who sent those feedbacks. We tried hard to make this release best for your needs, requirements, and expectations.

In this release, we focused on the fact that most effective way of reading fast is to read posts as soon as they are retrieved. Hence, we perfected Newzie to accomplish this goal before reaching the Version One. And hope that you feel that.

Here are short notes about this release before getting into the real stuff.

• Setup package weights 2296 KBs and you can click [here] to download it.
• If you already have a Newzie installed, before installing this new one, make sure that you uninstall your previous one. Check [update instructions] for more.
• Check [release notes] for more detailed(and raw) information on this release.

Now lets talk about what this new release includes. Following segments will introduce those new and upgraded parts of the Newzie in short.

To be honest, we were not satified with our popup notifier. It was not effective and efficient way of showing things with respect to what we have in mind. With this new release, we upgraded that window, and called it 'Today Panel.'

This new window has all functionality that popup notifier had. It again pops up out of your system tray but shows things in more compact way, which lets you see and read them more quickly.

Maybe the most distinctive feature of it is that you can use it as a stand-alone window because it is actually another visual mode of the Newzie, like Newsbar. After it pops up, you can grap it and drag wherever you want on your screen. You can even switch to 'Today Panel' while in fullview mode, like switching to Newsbar.

'Today Panel' is especially handy if you like to use your favorite browser to read retrieved posts. Just switch to the Today panel and go through those newly retrieved posts. Choose the one you like to read and click on it. Then let it opens up in your favorite browser. Quite neat. After sometime, you may start to use this new mode as a main frame, because it's just so handy.

Also check out the new design of the post tooltip shown above, which gives you more information about focused post in much better colored format. Speaking of tooltips, look at the redesigned subscription tooltip below, which enables you to see new posts from that focused subscription on fly.

Another way of reaching new content is via monitoring traditional webpages for updates. Previous version of Newzie was only capable of monitoring newly added links, images, and text segments inside monitored webpages. Now, we powered up webpage monitoring capabilities. This new release allows you to monitor webpages for occurances of special words that you define.

In other words, when webpage gets updated and a new content includes those words you are looking for, Newzie notifies you. So no need to check webpages manually one-by-one, Newzie can do it for you without wasting your time and effort.

Today more and more feeds are coming with advertisement embedded into the posts as an image. Although we are not against advertisement, since it's the fact of life, sometimes it makes things slow because of load time of html-based presentations produced by Newzie.

To prevent such slow loads, Newzie provides you an option to strip out images. So when a channel publishes posts with images embedded inside, just tell Newzie to block those images coming from that specific channel before giving you a hard time.

Stripping-out images is a very affective way of gaining speed while reading things in html-based reports inside the Newzie since you don't have to wait the page to load.

In addition to images, Newzie also provides one more generic option and that is, to strip out all html-based codes embeded inside the post, which comes handy at dealing with wrongly formatted posts.

*Very* previous versions of Newzie included this feature, but while developing that reborned version of Newzie, we couldn't have found the time to put it. Now it is again onboard and, we believe, one of most effective features of Newzie.

It basically allows you to hide the content of posts, while keeping only title visible. In this way, you can see more posts in the same area and focus on the ones you like to read quickly. Hence, it shrinks the visible content into the titles and lets you get over with them in shorter time. You will love it.

New release of Newzie gives more information about the system status, not only via status bar located at the bottom of the mainframe, but also when it is minimized into your system tray.

When you hold your mouse over the Newzie icon a second, status panel pops up and gives you couple of statistics, such as how many new and unread posts are waiting to be read. Note that when there are new posts, the icon turns to red, tiny but a very neat feature, huh?

Although there were many small and mid-sized bugs poking inside the Newzie, besides them, we are so glad that we cought four bugs that really gave us, and sadly our users, a hard time.

Those were dead mouse whell, not functional "open (ext)" context menu option, a bug that makes Newsbar show already shown posts again and again, and another nasty one which shutdowns all network activity of Newzie after closing the Feedback dialog, which was a very shameful moment for us when we saw it. So, the ride is getting much smoother and bug-free.

In fact, there are many new and updated parts left to be mentioned. Considering that we couldn't updated the help documentation, later on we will post more information and short guidelines to make you use new Newzie more effectively.

However, if you like to learn more about new and updated parts, and removed bugs, check the release notes. You can also send us your emails to address or visit our 'Contact Us' panel to send your messages quickly.

So what is next? Of course it will be 0.99.9 (enough 9s, huh?) and all about smashed bug stories, better initialization and making Newzie more talkative, meaning that it will inform you more about system status and make you take actions for better performance. Before the Version One, it will be the last stop and, actually, a very interesting one.