New BlogBridge Alpha

Hey, sorry if you aren't a BlogBridge user yet, but I just can't resist some news here.

First of all, we've released a new Alpha, just today. You can get it here. The way we work it is that if after a week or so of use there are no show stopped bugs, we will promote the Alpha to a Beta. The general release model is described here.

This new version has a ton of new feature stuff, plus major stability and performance improvements. I dare say, we are getting close to having a Release 1.0 product. Here are some highlights:

• The BlogBridge Service gets a major new capability, which is RSS Discovery Services. The change to the user experience is minimal but I would say pretty significant. When you want to add a Feed, you don't need to hunt for the RSS Feed URL, which our non-technical users won't even understand. You just enter the URL for the Blog itself, that is, the one you read with a Web Browser, and BlogBridge will attempt to 'discover' the RSS Feed. Behind the scenes it spawns a process to talk to the BlogBridge Service to resolve it. Try it, it's pretty cool!

• The second major new capability is the Feed Discovery Service. In it's initial form, there is a new command on the Feed Menu: "Discover new Feeds". Again working behind the scenes with the service, BlogBridge will analyze all the articles in a certain Feed, to see whether any of them point to Blogs that you don't know yet. If so, they are highlighted right in the article (let's say in Red.) The user can right click on the link and in one step add that new Feed to their subscription list.

• Among the smaller changes are, much better (although not yet perfect) support of Mac OSX, a minor change to the menu structure and terminology based on customer feedback, and numerous bug fixes and performance improvements.

Here is a link to the announcement email we sent to our users.
Enjoy!