Why there is no new release yet

“Almost August, and no new newsbeuter release, yet?”, you may ask yourself. Well, the reasons for it are manifold.

First of all, one reason was that I recently didn’t have too much time for working on any new newsbeuter stuff due to lack of time. My regular work consumes most of my energy, so I haven’t been able to do any remotely productive private programming work in the last few months.

Another huge factor is that the current state in git isn’t quite ready to release yet: it pretty much has the features that I want the next release to have, but it still has a few nasty bugs in it (segmentation faults, deadlocks) that I introduced since the release of newsbeuter 2.0 but was unable to find so far. And, due to lack of time, I never had any good opportunity to actually spend some time on debugging.

And last, but not least, I’m going to spend two weeks of holidays in August. Until then, I still have quite a lot to do, so there will be no work on newsbeuter in July and August. Well, maybe end of August. Sorry, folks, it will still take a few weeks for the next release (but definitely within 2009!). Unless maybe somebody else does the debugging work for me.

Newsbeuter 2.1 will contain support for 256-color terminals

Recently, I found and fixed a bug that prevented the awesome STFL to function correctly on 256-color terminals such as xterm with TERM=xterm-256color. In addition, I added support to both STFL and newsbeuter to specify colors from the whole 256-color palette. Currently, if you want to try out this feature, you need the latest SVN version of STFL (can be found here) and the latest git master branch version (can be found here). To specify one of the “extended” colors, simply use “color<n>” (e.g. “color123″) instead of using the color name (“blue”, “black, “green”, etc.) in the color-related configuration. A chart of color numbers and how they look like can be found here. Finally, here’s a screenshot of the whole thing:

As you can probably recognize, these are not the usual colors from the usual 16-color palette. But, since I’m really bad at designing colorful themes, I ask everyone who has an interesting newsbeuter color configuration to submit it to me so that I can include it to newsbeuter’s contrib directory that already contains a few theme examples.

Newsbeuter now has an official logo!

Thanks to Markus Stumpf, newsbeuter now has an official logo: