The first of the updates is up. Choose Check for Updates to get it. (If that doesn’t work, you can download it here.)

There’s plenty more to do — but this is a start. There will be more updates.

Changes in 3.2.8

64-bit code (on 64-bit Intel systems). This may not have much of an effect, except for one big thing — when Flash crashes, it should no longer take down the app with it. (Flash is the single biggest cause of crashes in NetNewsWire.)

Toolbar icon and button for sending to Instapaper.

Send to Instapaper now appears in contextual menu when you click on a link in a description or web page.

Swapped out the send-feedback system for a link to NetNewsWire’s UserVoice page. This way people can see if their feature requests are already made, and they can vote on requests.

Tab thumbnails are now loaded as needed, instead of all at startup, which should help startup time for people with hundreds or thousands of tabs.

Made some changes that *may* help people behind proxies, particularly authenticating proxies, though I’m not sure of that yet. (It’s something to watch for.)

We’ve been working for many months on a shared code base for all three versions of NetNewsWire (and for iPhone and iPad TapLynx too, making five apps in total) — and we’re now at the point where it’s mostly done, done enough that we can start integrating it into the apps themselves.

Rather than save it all up and do one big update for each app — which would take quite a while — we decided to do it piece-by-piece. This means there will be more-frequent incremental updates for a while, until we get all the apps caught up to where they need to be.

The Mac version will be first, since it doesn’t have to go through an App Store review process. After this update there will be more, so if the bug fix or small feature you’re waiting for isn’t in this one, just know that we’re working on it.

iPad and iPhone updates are coming soon too, though those will take a little longer since they go through the App Store review process. And, like the Mac version, they will be small updates, and there will be a number of them, rather than just one big update.

I’ve posted about this before — but it’s time for a reminder: it’s very important that the version of NetNewsWire you’re using (whether Mac, iPad, or iPhone) is the latest version.

The folks at Google Reader changed how authentication works, and some while ago we released updated versions of NetNewsWire that work with the new system.

For a while Google Reader has worked with both old and new systems — but tomorrow (Tuesday) it’s switching over to the new system entirely.

Here’s what to do:

NetNewsWire for iPad and iPhone: go into the App Store on your iPhone or iPad and see if NetNewsWire is listed as an update. If so, get the update.

NetNewsWire for Mac: do a Check for Updates from the NetNewsWire menu. (It’s in the upper-left corner of your screen.) If for any reason it doesn’t work, you can download the most recent version here:

http://netnewswireapp.com/downloads/NetNewsWire.zip

You can verify that you have the latest version by opening NetNewsWire’s about window: it should say that it’s 3.2.7 (or greater, in the case of beta testers).

If you have any questions about this, please ask on one of the forums:

NetNewsWire for Mac forum
NetNewsWire for iPad forum
NetNewsWire for iPhone forum

I’ve recently resurrected my brentsdevdiary account on Twitter.

Let me warn you: it’s geeky and boring. It’s an experiment in working in public — I narrate what I’m working on (to the extent I can), which means that I’m sitting in a chair, staring at a screen, and writing code. Which is not exactly a thrill ride for the spectator. (Even when it’s a thrill ride for me.)

But, as they say, if this is the kind of thing you like, then you’ll like it.

One important thing, though: it’s not a NetNewsWire support line. Doing support via Twitter is pretty much not do-able as it is (140 characters isn’t enough space). But this account especially needs to be free of support questions. (We have other options for support: forums and UserVoice pages and a Frequently Asked Questions page.)

NetNewsWire – The Perfect Mac RSS Reader: “You could select it as the default RSS reading app and the next time you click on the RSS icon from Safari, NetNewsWire would subscribe to that site and even update your Google Reader account.”

This is a nice review, and much appreciated. I do wish it really was the perfect Mac RSS reader — but there’s so much more I want to do. I’m working on a 3.3 release right now (with bug fixes, performance enhancements, and a few small new features).

And then, after 3.3, there will still be tons more I want to do. Even though NetNewsWire is eight years old, I still feel like I’ve just gotten started: I’ve done about 5% of what I want.

So I keep working.

NetNewsWire 1.0.3 for iPad will be in the App Store soon, within the next few hours. (You may see it already.)

(It was submitted 8 days ago — sometimes the review process is a little long. It’s impossible to predict. Obviously, if I could do anything to make it quicker, I would, but it’s entirely in Apple’s hands.)

What’s new in 1.0.3:

- You can sort articles by oldest at top or newest at top — see the NetNewsWire section in Settings.

- Performance is somewhat better for people with very large numbers of articles.

- Fixed a bug that could make unread counts for folders incorrect.