Today I would like to make you aware of bookmark sets in RSSOwl 2. They offer you a great way of organizing your list of subscriptions into logical units. Consider the following screenshot:

As you can see, three sets (Home, Work, Vacation) have been created by using the Manage Bookmark-Sets action from the bookmarks view. Each set contains a list of bookmarks. You can switch between sets using the two yellow arrows in the toolbar of the view. Navigating between sets will make the list of subscriptions reduce to only those that are part of the selected set. You can move bookmarks to other sets either by opening the Properties of the bookmark and changing its location, or dragging it into another set inside the opened Manage Bookmark-Sets dialog.

Sets can also be useful if you have some bookmarks that you want to keep, but remove from your active set of subscriptions. Simply move them to another set. Once you changed your mind, you can move those bookmarks back to your active set.

Bug 943 will be famous for having so many duplicates. In short, it will make the user experience of the embedded browser much better on Windows. Most importantly, beginning with M9, JavaScript will be disabled by default (you can enable it again in preferences if necessary). This should make it much easier to use RSSOwl in areas, where IE is not allowed due to security concerns. Note that you can always switch over to using Mozilla inside RSSOwl, even on Windows.

Tabbed browsing is a well known concept from most modern web browsers and RSSOwl 2 is supporting this feature as well. However, you have to change some options in preferences to make it work. Further versions of RSSOwl 2 (beginning with M9) will enable this feature out of the box.

To enable tabbed browsing in RSSOwl, open preferences and find the Miscellaneous section. Enable Show multiple tabs side by side and decide on the maximum of tabs to show below. This option greatly reduces the clutter of opened tabs by limiting the maximum number of tabs that will show at the same time. That's it. From now on you can have multiple feeds and websites open at the same time!

Just a short heads up that a preview of upcoming milestone 9 will be available soon. This preview already fixes 54 bugs and comes with 11 noteworthy new features.

Stay tuned for more info on the preview!

In this week's tip for RSSOwl 2, I would like to bring attention to the bookmark wizard for subscribing to feeds. Instead of using the link of a feed to subscribe, you can simply type a keyword or phrase describing your interest and choose from a list of popular search engines.

We think this is a great way of staying in touch with areas of your interest. You should give it a try!

Sun has just released the Update 10 of Java 1.6. Among other changes, this release comes with the Java Quick Starter included. According to Sun, this features improves the cold startup time of Java applications (e.g. after a system boot).

I gave it a try and was able to speed up the startup time by 30%. Note that the quick starter is not running in case your notebook is running on battery power. Also note that as far as I know, this service is only provided on Windows XP.

Grab the update from here.

Beginning with today, I plan to write about some useful features in RSSOwl 2 that you might not have heard before.

The notifier feature in RSSOwl is capable of informing you as soon as news are downloaded. It can easily be enabled from the "Notifier" entry in preferences. Enabling this feature will show notifications for any downloaded news from all of your subscriptions.

Now, consider you only want to be notified about news that match a specific search (e.g. all news that contain a certain word or where the author is a specific person). Simply create this search as "Saved Search" with the desired conditions and set the Notifier to only show notifications for this search in preferences.

As soon as News Filters are implemented, this feature will even be easier to use.
Stay tuned for milestone 9!