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News Explorer 2.2: Improved Google News support and more

July 7, 2025 — by Ron Elemans

News Explorer 2.2 brings improved support for Google News feeds, hashtag timeline feeds for Bluesky and Mastodon, sharing to Raindrop, and some other useful improvements and fixes.

Improved Google News support

Google News RSS feeds offer nicely aggregated article selections, but can be unattractive to use in a RSS reader because of the lack of preview thumbnails and full-text support. The article links in Google News feeds are indirect links, that only open the original article after being processed by Google.

News Explorer 2.2 pre-opens each Google News article visible in the List or Timeline view, so that the original article link becomes available. This makes it possible to retrieve thumbnail metadata and to download the full-text version of articles. Of course this pre-open processing works a bit slower, but you are being rewarded with nice preview thumbnails and full-text support for most articles.

News Explorer 2.2
News Explorer configured with only Google News feeds.

Hashtag feeds

You can now follow hashtag timeline feeds for Bluesky and Mastodon. To add a hashtag feed for Bluesky for example, click or tap on the plus button in the bottom toolbar of the feeds list, and choose 'New Bluesky Feed' in the menu. In the appearing dialog simply enter the hashtag, like #comics, and save the new feed.

Share to Raindrop

You can now share article links together with custom tags to a Raindrop account without installing additional software. The Raindrop account can be set in the Sharing section of the app settings.

Filter improvements

Some small changes are made with sidebar filters. This does not affect your current filters.

  • New filter parameter ‘Feed link’, which filters on the link of an article.
  • Parameter ‘Feed’ has been renamed to ‘Feed title’, so make it distinguishable from the new ‘Feed link’ parameter.
  • Parameter ‘Folder’ has been renamed to ‘Folder title’.
  • Time period parameters can now be set to 0 days. This equals to the start of the current day until now.

Changes and fixes

The following aspects has been changed or fixed:

  • Support for Pocket has been removed. The service is no longer active.
  • Implementation of sharing to Instapaper has been simplified. To continue to share to Instapaper, remove the login in the Sharing section of the app settings, and login again.
  • Implemented support for displaying Bluesky verification and trusted badges.
  • Fixed non-working YouTube videos resulting in ‘error 4 ’ in YouTube feeds.
  • Restored downloading comments for YouTube shorts.

Downloads

News Explorer owners can download the update for free from the App Store on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or Apple Vision Pro. In case you have purchased News Explorer directly from Betamagic, you can update the app via menu News Explorer > Check for Updates. Setapp users can update News Explorer in the Setapp app, in case the app is not already updated automatically. If you are not yet a News Explorer user, you can try the app for free on your Mac, 14 days long.

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