A new version of Linux RSS client NewsFlash is out – and newsflash: it’s looking good!
I’ve written about this app in detail in the past so I won’t cover its core feature set in this post, except to say: it’s a desktop RSS reader that can sync with various cloud services (including Miniflux, FreshRSS, NewsBlur, and CommaFeed, new in this release) or run locally.
Like a great many GTK apps of late, the latest edition of NewsFlash takes full advantage of the adaptive awesome-sauce added in libadwaita 1.4 – the version at the heart of the recent GNOME 45 release.
As well as making the app looking nicer with full-height sidebars and borderless toolbars (these allow the 3 column layout to apply subtly different background colours to each – something common in RSS reader apps for other platforms) it ensures the app works great on smaller screens and mobile.
There are new features and other improvements too – including speed boosts.
“No more spawning threads manually for a single operation. No more blocking locks. Everything is async and runs on a single tokio runtime which is way smarter about task managing than I ever could be,” explains NewsFlash dev Jan Lukas Gernert.
Window state is also now ‘remembered’ when you close NewsFlash, and restored the next time you open it. This remembers more than the size of the window but sidebar item selection, article list mode, search term entered, and article zoom size too — nice!
NewsFlash 3.0 at-a-glance:
- Refreshed UI uses full-height sidebar and border-less toolbars
- Better sizing of sidebar and article list
- Drag & Drop feeds between categories/folders
- New “Add a Feed” dialog (works better on mobile)
- New edit dialogs for feeds, categories and tags
- Improved loading times
- Faster syncing, marking articles read and fetching articles
- App remembers window state (and more)
- Widened support for article thumbnails in article list
- Offline mode
And those are but the headline features – check the Flathub change-log for more.
You can get the latest version of NewsFlash on Flathub, or install an older version from the Snap Store in advance of it (hopefully) being updated sometime soon.
