According to the RSS Bandit roadmap the time draws nigh for the next release of RSS Bandit codenamed Nightcrawler. As with the previous release we will have an alpha version which will be mostly feature complete, followed by a beta version which will be feature complete and then the final release. Last week, Torsten and I agreed on the following plan for the alpha version of Nightcrawler.

Release Date: August 31, 2005

New Features:

• NNTP Newsgroups support
• Downloading of Enclosures/Podcasts
• Subscription Wizard replaces Add New Feed dialog
• Fast Mode (shutting off comment threading which uses a lot of CPU)
• Synchronization with Newsgator Online
• Atom 1.0 Support
• Extensibility Framework to Enable Richer Plugins
• Item Manipulation from Newspaper Views (e.g. Mark As Read, Flagging)
• Tip of the Day on Startup

There's also a persistent bug that has been bothering some of our users where posts from different feeds end up being mixed up. We haven't located the source of this bug but have added some tracing to the build which will be enabled in the alpha. Users who end up with mixed up feeds after the alpha can send us the trace files which should help us narrow down the source of the problem.

There are a couple of features I'd like to see in the final version such as "Comment Watching" so I can tell when a post I am interested in gets new comments. However we need to start locking down for the next release so that feature isn't likely to make it in unless I can sneak it in before the beta.  If there are other small, nice to have features you'd like to see in Nightcrawler please file a feature request in SourceForge and we'll see what we can get to before the final release.

Any comments or other feedback would be greatly appreciated.