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The most important one was to fix the freezing bug that many users were experiencing. This appears to have been caused by a new auto-tooltip feature introduced in Leopard. The idea is when you hover over an item in a table that's too long to fit the cell, a tooltip will appear showing the full text. Suddenly eing asked to draw the cell contents in a tooltip window rather than the table itself confused my code, sometimes leading to a freeze.

I've fixed the bug and have the tooltip feature working. Currently it's only for item titles, but support for showing the text of items will come later.

I've also made it so that if you hit the delete key while viewing a channel within a smart group, it'll offer you the option of unsubscribing, rather than just beeping. Within ordinary groups I've redesigned the delete dialog to be easier to use. Finally, you can hit delete on the Channel Guide to get rid of it.

Leopard got rid of brushed metal from the Shrook window background, and this release removes some of the associated chrome, in particular the border around the main panes, and the embossing effect on the status text at the bottom.

In v2.61 I made Shrook reregister with Growl more often. Not only was it too often, but it caused a weird bug in X11 apps that stole the window focus. It should only reregister very occasionally now.

Finally it fixes an address corruption bug several people reported, makes the left arrow key work properly when you're viewing a web page, and fixes some bugs with column resizing.

If you don't already have it, a download link is on the Shrook page.

Now here's a coincidence for you. Today I received an email from a software company offering me a not insignificant amount of money if I included what amounted to spyware with Shrook.

I turned them down.

You can find a copy of your latest OPML file in Home > Library > Application Support > Shrook2, if you want to temporarily use something else.

• Old items are now faded, like in the Mac version
• The author of a post is shown by the title
• The "Show web pages" preference is now honoured. There's currently no control over this (except form the client), so let me know if it causes problems.

The multi-threaded version of Shrook has been performing solidly in testing for the last month, so it's time to go public. You'll notice it's much more responsive when it's checking lots of channels at once, and items no longer jump around under the cursor.

The most obvious sign of the change is that now the stop buttons next to busy channels will go light grey for a period before they disappear. This is when loading is finished but processing on a separate thread is still ongoing. In this version, the final stage of processing still occurs in the main thread, and is indicated by a new "Processing" message in the status box. You should only see it occasionally, and typically only for less then a second (if this isn't the case, let me know).

There's also a big improvement in Shrook's attachment support: It actually works now. There was a show-stopping bug that affected a number of users, but I've now tracked down and fixed the problem.

One final note: Mac OS X v10.3 is no longer supported.

Download it from the Shrook page.

The work for this also made it easy for me to batch together when new items appear, so the window content is no longer in a state of constant flux. You now get one big update every few seconds. I'll get this in your hands shortly.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently - I started a new day job a couple of months ago and it's taken a while for things to settle down. I've also wasted a lot of time looking into what Core Data can do for Shrook (A: Nothing. It could certainly replace a lot of the existing internals of Shrook, but wouldn't offer much new and has several enormous flaws. Most of the hype about it is simply not true).

• I've resurrected the checkboxes from Thrupp v1.x, making copying whole albums much easier. Any song you drag over will now make the whole album appear but with only that track ticked, and then you can just tick the album's checkbox to copy the whole album. If you have certain songs disabled in iTunes, the first time you tick the album checkbox it will make the songs ticked in Thrupp match the songs ticked in iTunes. Click the box again to select all the songs in Thrupp
• Playlists now have two modes: "As playlist" and "As albums". Basically this allows you to change individual playlists to use the "Album subfolders" preference instead of the playlist preference. "As albums" works well if you have a smart playlist for selecting recently added songs, for example. I plan to build a lot on this setting in the future.
• The numbers in file names are now dynamically generated rather than relying on track numbers. This makes multi-disc albums work a lot better.
• Thrupp now copies songs in track order, for players that can't sort songs themselves.
• Total files sizes now display correctly for playlists over 2GB.
• Aliased iTunes folders now work correctly.