Brief 1.2 beta 3 available

Fri, 05/23/2008 - 16:21 — ancestor

This is the last beta before the final release. This version is feature-frozen, no further changes will be made except bug fixes. Please let me know what you think about the changes and report any bugs you find.

Download Brief 1.2 beta 3 - English only, compatible only with Firefox 3 RC1

Before you install
If you are still running one of the older development versions (1.2 alpha, 1.2 beta 1), it's recommended that you upgrade step-by-step: first install beta 2, restart Firefox, and only then install beta 3.

Troubleshooting
If you experience trouble after upgrading from a earlier beta/alpha, you can fix that by deleting brief.sqlite from the profile directory. This will delete all of your previously stored items.

What's new in beta 3:
New features and improvements:

Performance was improved, especially when browsing feeds that have many items. Switching pages is almost 4 times faster, removing items from the view (e.g. when marking an item as read in the Unread view) should also be a lot snappier.
Integration with Places - the new Firefox 3 bookmarks system. Starred items are now simply bookmarks. Clicking on the star of a bookmarked entry brings up the familiar Edit Bookmark panel, just like the one in the Location Bar. Brief also integrates with tagging. The list of tags is shown in the sidebar, so you can browser items by their tags. Of course, tags of items can also be searched using the search bar (in addition to titles, contents, and authors).
Duration of smooth scrolling was tweaked.

Fixed bugs:

Exceptions in the Error Console when the sidebar is hidden.
Double-clicking Mark Read button in the Unread view results in infinite stream of exceptions in the Error Console (thanks to Ngamer for finding the bug.)
Brief interacts better with NoScript. You no longer have to add all file:// URLs to the whitelist, Brief has its own resource:// URL.

The rest of the changes since Brief 1.1:
New features and improvements:

Starred entries are also added to bookmarks.
Smoother checking feeds for updates, uses less CPU and doesn't lock up Firefox.
Searching is a lot faster, matches only full words, and provides Google-like syntax, for example you can type: Mozilla OR "Firefox extension" -tabs.
Spinbuttons (these tiny arrows) were added to textboxes in options for entering numbers.
The way how item selection works was altered a little bit. Now you can use keyboard navigation without turning on the blue selection outline. You can press Space or K to scroll to the next item and Backspace or J to scroll the previous one, but the outline won't appear. You can toggle the selection outline separately by pressing Tab or Q - just like before.
You can hold Ctrl when clicking "Mark all items as read" button to mark only the current page.
When a web page is displayed, clicking the currently selected feed in the sidebar restores the feed view.
The progress bar and the stop button are shown when checking feeds for updates in the background, instead of only when the user manually initiated it.
J/K and Alt+J/Alt+K shortcuts were swapped to match what seems to be the common layout among most other applications.
Visual improvements to the the feed view.
Option to "Enable managing items using keyboard" in the options window (it used to be accessible only using the Tab keyboard shortcut).
Option to "Sort oldest items first in unread view".
Keyboard shortcut to open Brief: Ctrl + Shift + A.
The custom style system was redesigned. Until now you had to provide a complete CSS file as a replacement for the default style, even if you wanted to make a simple change. From now on you can add rules on top of the default style and there is a simple built-in editor available in the Options window. It should make things a whole lot easier for the users.
Options window was reorganized.
An often-requested feed-specific setting not to mark changed items as unread.
The feed-specific setting to "Store no more than __ latest items of each feed" has been removed. The global option is still available. See this topic for background.
When searching, matched words highlighted in the feed content.
Automatic updates of development versions - when the next beta is out, Brief will be upgraded automatically.
Network security dialogs, for example warnings about invalid certificates, are suppressed to avoid annoying the user whenever updating fails. This also includes authentication prompts, so if you subscribe to authenticated feeds, you can flip a hidden preference to restore the old behavior: extensions.brief.update.suppressSecurityDialogs.
When an item has no title, the URL is shown as the title.

Fixed bugs:

When only unread items are displayed, after opening an item's web page and then going back, marking items as read doesn't work anymore
Ctrl+Tab (shortcut for switching tabs) toggles item selection outline. It shouldn't.
In headlines view, when unfolding an item taller than the window height, the scroll position lines up with the bottom of the item instead of the top
Sometimes when mass-updating feeds some of them are skipped.
The feed view flickers when refreshed.
Favicons in the list of feeds sometimes get mixed up.
Contents of items are now a displayed like any other normal elements in web pages, which fixes various things that didn't with the special way Brief used to serve the contents. This includes tooltips (floating titles of elements), Firefox extensions that interact with contents of web pages, and potentially some other stuff.
OPML importing was significantly improved. Brief handles more kinds of files and deals with errors better (thanks to DG for providing samples of various problematic OMPL files).

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Fri, 05/23/2008 - 16:53 — arcAnan (not verified)

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Brief 1.2 beta 3 available