Joel Spolsky's recent article summarises some of the challenges in UI design that Vienna has always striven to overcome. If I simply threw in options for choices that everyone has ever requested on the support forum then the Preferences panes would be overloaded. Instead I've been pretty careful to try and keep the choices manageable even to the point of not having choices at all. For example, Vienna 2.1 introduces manual sorting of folders in the folder list. At one point we had a choice of manual and automatic sorting. I spent some time convincing Jeff that we should be able to make it work with just manual sorting and let the program be intelligent about where to add new folders. I don't think we've got it entirely right in 2.1 but I should stress that any faults there are entirely mine.

As we go forward, we'll continue to apply Occam's Razor to the UI as much as is reasonable. I want Vienna to be simple and uncluttered as well as feature rich and powerful. The two need not necessarily be contradictions. It all comes down to design and spending the extra time to think through how features work best. That isn't something that developers are necessarily best at which is why I'm happy to solicit input from people who have no development skills but a raft of experience in making user interfaces work. Good developers will know how to take these designs and make them into workable code but ultimately I prefer that the designers have no preconcieved notions of the limits of the code. The right time to disabuse a designer that a particular design is unworkable is only after the developers have actually taken the time to try and make it work. And not before.

So if you're a user interface designer with a lot of imagination, an appreciation for usable Mac OSX interfaces and no clue for what can or can't be done at the code level then feel free to post your ideas over at the Vienna support forum. While we can't promise that every idea will become reality, you may just ignite the spark that creates the next innovative idea in Vienna!

Several people have contacted me to let me know they're having problems creating a new account at CocoaForge, the site that hosts our support forum. I've been in touch with the admins and they have let me know that they're looking into the matter.

I'll post an update when I hear back from them. In the meantime, feel free to post bug reports to our site at SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/vienna-rss -or send us an e-mail to vienna-rss-admins@lists.sourceforge.net.

- Steve

It's been a long time but I'm happy to announce that Vienna 2.1 is now released. You can download it from the Open Community web page or use Check for Updates (from the Vienna menu in pre-release versions of 2.1 or the Help menu in 2.0.4.)

There are a number of new features in 2.1 which are described on the Features page, but also a host of bug fixes and minor improvements. In keeping with the philosophy of Vienna, we've worked hard to make these improvements simple and seamless. Another significant change is the addition of three new localisations contributed by volunteers. To the languages supported in 2.0.4 we have now added Brazilian Portuguese, Korean and Simplified Chinese.

A list of the key changes in 2.1 include:

1. Support manually sorting folders by default.
2. Added "Increase text size" and "Decrease Text Size" for browser view.
3. Changed key combination for "Cancel Refreshing" to control-command-s to make command-"-" available for text size.
4. Added "Send Link" functionality for article view.
5. Add address bar and refresh, back and forward buttons at the top of the browser web pages.
6. Add -profile command line option to support custom profiles (needed for Portable Vienna).
7. Added "Refresh Folder Images" command.
8. Added "Blog With" command to blog the selected article.
9. Sort article list by multiple columns, saving the order in which columns were sorted.
10. Added "Summary" field which shows the first part of the description.
11. In condensed reading mode with the pane on the right, the headline fields can now be configured.
12. Added "Filter By" to allow articles to be filtered in the article list by all, unread or date.
13. Persist open tabs when Vienna exits and restore them when it restarts.
14. Handles HTTP 410 to mark a feed as unsubscribed.
15. Add button to Mark All Read the selected feeds.
16. Unread articles marked as bold.
17. Allow dragging of Trash folder.
18. Green icon for articles with updated article text.
19. Don't select first article when switching folders.
20. Renaming folders now done by editing the name in the folder pane.
21. Changed modifier key for overriding default browser preference from shift to option.
22. Add Get Info command option and moved Validate command to the info panel.
23. New Layout menu: report, condensed and unified layouts.
24. Provide two new options for new articles notifications: bounce dock icon or no notification at all.
25. Add Keyboard Shortcuts item to Help menu.
26. Change browser's user agent string from Mozilla/Safari to Vienna.
27. Use Sparkle framework for version updates.

Thanks to everybody who assisted with the beta testing and for the valuable and constructive feedback. Personal thanks from me to Jeff for his efforts as co-administrator and a contributor of a whole host of bug fixes to the 2.1 code base over the last few months.

- Steve