Leopard Feature #301
It was a great relief for Leopard to finally be finished, after more than two years of work. (And if you wonder why it took so long, consider some of the new products that have been released since Tiger shipped in May 2005: the Intel Macs, the Apple TV and the iPhone / iPod Touch. All of these contain system software that absorbed the attentions of significant subsets of the people who work on on OS X.)
And now, a few weeks later, it’s hit the streets. On Tiger Day in 2005 I helped out a bit at the Apple store in Santa Clara; that was fun, but tonight I stayed home because I’m recovering from a bad cold. Still, in between coughing fits, I can ring in the new OS by pointing out yet another little improvement, one that didn’t make it into the official Top 300 list.
#301: Safari RSS Article-Reading Improvements
You can now choose to leave new articles marked as “unread” until you explicitly mark them as read by clicking on them. This is more like other news-readers, and it’s good if you want to skim through bucketloads of new articles and read a few of them, but still know which ones you skipped over so you can get to them later.
To turn on this mode, go to the “RSS” pane in Safari’s preferences, and look for the pop-up menu labeled “Mark Articles As Read:”. Change the value to “After clicking them.”
You’ll also want to make sure “Highlight unread articles” is checked, so that you can tell the read and unread articles apart. By the way, this highlighting has been improved, too. Instead of just changing the headline text to orange, Safari now draws a pale blue background behind the article, and adds the same blue bullet that Mail uses for unread messages. Click anywhere in an unread article to mark it as read. (There’s also a “Mark All As Read” item under “Actions” in the sidebar.)
If you really want to speed-read through articles in a hurry, drag the article-length slider (in the sidebar at the top right) all the way to the left. In this view, the articles now display in a very compact single-line list view, with just room for the first bit of the text in between the title and the date. You can still click a headline to jump to its web page, or move the slider back to the right to expand the articles. (Clicking the blue bullet at the left marks an article as read without viewing it.)
Nothing earth-shaking, I know, but I’m happy about these tweaks because they bring the Safari RSS experience more into line with the way we first prototyped it in 2004. Most of what my team-mates and I worked on for Leopard is hidden away behind the scenes (the new “PubSub” framework that supports Mail RSS as well as Safari) but it’s nice to have contributed to a bit of more visible functionality too.
(Speaking of the PubSub framework, it has a public API that makes it extremely easy to parse and subscribe to RSS or Atom news feeds. There are some sample applications using it in /Developer/Applications/PubSub, and I’ll also try to post an overview here, now that I can finally talk about these things publicly.)
October 27th, 2007 at 2:08 AM
Wh—1994? Was Apple was planning Safari longer than I thought?
October 27th, 2007 at 8:51 AM
Judging from the documentation, the PubSub framework looks awesome. I haven’t had time to code with it yet, but I definitely will.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:47 AM
Ack! Sorry, I keep making that mistake. It’s a sign of how old I am…
October 27th, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Since you’re involved with these sorts of things, can you tell us if there’s been any movement to get away from the “RSS” term, or at least to start using the feed icon instead of an RSS badge?
October 27th, 2007 at 1:00 PM
Jesper: I’m not happy with those either, but unfortunately I’m not in a position to make such decisions. I don’t see either the name or the icon changing in the future, unless someone has an unexpected change of opinion.
November 9th, 2007 at 4:17 PM
I’ve noticed a weird behavior in Safari on Leopard:
I have my RSS set to only show the feeds of day. If I have for instance 50 unread items in a particular feed, and clic on it, it will show only the news items of the day, let’s say 40 of them. This means there are 10 unread items from yesterday (or before). If I select “yesterday” on the right column, all items are marked as read, even though I didn’t actually view them.
Same for groups of feeds, viewing one of them marks them all as read.
Is this a bug with Leopard, or is this the expected behavior? I liked the Tiger behavior better.
November 9th, 2007 at 4:21 PM
Omar: That was an intentional change. We had too many reports of feeds whose unread count mysteriously wouldn’t go down to zero, which ended up being caused by someone viewing only a subset of articles (like today’s or this week’s). We decided the new approach — always marking all the entries as read no matter what filter is set — was less confusing overall.
If you want more control, try switching on the feature I described, where you click articles to mark them as read.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:50 AM
I’ve noticed a few weird things:
- Sometimes the unread count inexplicably goes to 20. Not sure if this is a server bug or a client bug. I’ve had this happen with different feeds, so I’m assuming it is a client bug. I’ve seen this manifest as 20 duplicates of the most recent article as well as marking old articles new again.
- Clicking “Update Now” when there are new articles causes the unread count to be unchangeable, even after clicking the article to mark it as read or clicking the website title on the bookmark bar. Quitting & restarting Safari fixes it.
- Missing articles. I believe this to be a server issue but it’s worth mentioning anyway. Sometimes when disconnected for awhile (i.e. check RSS in the morning, travel for 8 hours, check RSS in the evening) a block of articles is missing within the beginning of the 8 hour time range. I’m assuming it is the server software only listing the newest N articles.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:09 AM
Sorry Jens, I just saw your answer to my issue.
I’m afraid clicking articles to mark them as read is not an option for me, the feeds I follow can have 300+ postings in one day, and clicking each one as read would not be convenient. It’s too bad the Tiger behavior has disappeared entirely, I’d be thrilled if it was available even in a hidden pref through the terminal defaults write command. As it is, Safari RSS is unusable for me. I have a folder with several news websites (NYT, BBC, Le Monde…), clicking through every article to mark it as read is tedious, loading all threads with no filtering is very slow, as I said those feeds have 300+ articles per day easily, and all threads being marked as read regardless of filter rules makes for a much less powerful RSS experience.
I’d be delighted if the previous behavior could come back, even hidden.
Thanks for clarifying though!
December 7th, 2007 at 10:24 AM
Omar: Sorry the change isn’t a good one for you … sometimes it’s impossible to please every user!