...for Milestone 9 will be the ability to define news filters. The concept is already known to many mail clients and will allow you to let RSSOwl perform certain actions automatically on news that match a search criteria. Think about these useful actions:

• Automatically assign Tags
• Move or Copy news to bins
• Set a news to sticky
• and more

I will post progress on this feature over the next weeks. Our current plan is to release Milestone 9 somewhat end of November.

We have just completed a large task in the area of searching for news. A new search-specifier "contains all" was introduced that will ensure that a matching news contains all of the words as opposed to any. The existing specifier "contains" was renamed to "contains any" to match the old behavior. The default specifier when creating a new search now matches with what one usually gets from web search engines (all words have to match). In addition, wild-cards are now supported throughout all search-conditions.

If you want to give M9 a try, you can grab a recent nightly build. Usually, these builds are stable enough to be used everyday.

For the future, we will have a look at supporting phrase searches. This will allow for even more powerful search conditions where one can search for word phrases instead of just single words.

Stay tuned for more to come in the near future!

Update: Phrase search is now implemented and will be part of the upcoming M9 release!

The developers over at Excelsior just posted the results of their new Excelsior JET 6.5 beta 2. With Excelsior JET it is possible to compile a Java application to native code.

RSSOwl was chosen to be one of the demo RCP applications that are compiled natively. You can read more about it here. They also offer a download, but keep in mind that we have not yet fully tested the native version of RSSOwl. Also, it appears that the installation is limited in time until 6.5 final is released.

Thanks to Excelsior for choosing RSSOwl as application to show the capabilities of JET!

Milestone 8a has been out in the wild for a while now and I wanted to give a quick update on what nightly versions of Milestone 9 are already providing as new features and bugfixes:

• Secure credentials with a master password
• Automatic proxy detection
• Support for Firefox 3 and XULRunner 1.9
• 27 bugfixes and features so far

In case you have troubles running RSSOwl 2.0 M8a on Linux, make sure to give the nightly a try! We do the best to keep the nightlies stable and usable. As usual when using nightlies, make sure to backup your profile folder. See the FAQ for more details.

I just read that the SourceForge Community Choice Awards are now open for nominations. If you like RSSOwl and want us to be part of this competition, please nominate RSSOwl.

Thanks, Ben

Looking for a cool opportunity to show your skills as web designer? Take a look at the Job I just posted over at SourceForge. It's all about creating the next generation of rssowl.org for RSSOwl 2.0. If you are interested, please contact me directly.

One of the first steps in this new milestone is to move on to using Eclipse 3.4. Some of the cool benefits doing so is the ability to automatically retrieve proxy settings from the operating system (including proxy scripts that are popular in companies). Check out our nightlies if you can not wait until the final release.

As you can see from our roadmap, the top items for milestone 9 are

• Scalability of the feed view
• News Filter

The former should make it possible to display even thousands of news at once, without noticable slowdown. Think about showing the contents of a folder instantly as soon as you select it.

News Filter should will be fun. You will be able to define search-conditions and bind them to a certain action. E.g. showing the notifier, whenever a certain condition is true, or automatically labeling a news based on a condition.

Stay tuned for more info on the progress of M9!