What's in the next release of River2 

The first release of the River2 aggregator was all about CSS. I wanted to be sure this new aggregator would be buzzword compliant and user-configurable. I wanted the design community to have their way with this tool.

The second release has a completely different set of goals, they relate to the subscription engine, realtime processing of updates, and podcast support. Specifically...

1. Dynamic reading list support. A reading list is an OPML file that contains a subscription list that is read every time the aggregator scans its feeds. Any new feeds are subscribed to, and any feeds that are no longer in the list are unsubbed, assuming they aren't in another reading list or were independently subscribed to. This feature has been in my aggregators but not in most others. Google Reader, for example, does not support this feature, but imho it should. I'm putting this out there to help lead the market.

2. Fully rssCloud compliant. If you subscribe to a feed that has a cloud element, and you aren't behind a firewall or NAT, River2 will request notification, so that updates are received in realtime.

3. A podcatcher that's not from Apple. The market needs more than one podcatcher. So if you subscribe to a feed that has enclosures, it will download them into a folder of your choosing. This works for photo feeds as well as feeds with audio and video.

Tying it all together, here's a reading list that contains podcast feeds, one of which is cloud-enabled.

This release is not ready for download yet. Because I got a bad cold, and was sidelined last week, the project was set back by a week. But developers are moving ahead with their rssCloud implementations, and will need something to test against. That's one important role of River2, it represents a reference implementation of the client side of the rssCloud protocol.

What's next after this River2 release? More cloud-enabled feeds. An editorial tool that produces cloud-enabled feeds.