Although we’re very close, Beta 2 has not been officially released yet. The code available in our repository is unfinished code and does not represent the final product.

We will, however, be releasing the final Beta 2 very soon. Keep in mind that after wrapping up development (which will most likely be this weekend), there is still the matter of updating the website with the Beta 2 documentation, as well as other changes that we’re planning to make to the site, which may end up taking most of next week to get everything in order.

So hang on to your britches. You won’t find information about issues about Beta 2 by Googling, so hang on until we release it. 🙂

While we wait for Beta 2 development to wrap up, we’ve gone back and updated SimplePie Mobile with the latest trunk build of SimplePie, revamped the stylesheet to make it more readable, and renamed it to SimpleReader Mobile.

SimpleReader Mobile is a free, simple, no-nonsense feed reader designed for mobile devices. It has been tested on the Sony PSP, Palm TX’s Blazer browser, and Opera Mini on the Palm TX. If you’re on the go, or simply don’t want to walk over to the computer to read your feeds, you can go load up SimpleReader Mobile and punch in an address like digg.com, and instantly be reading the latest postings.

If you have a web-enabled mobile device, why not check it out?

One of the new features coming in SimplePie 1.0 Beta 2 is embedded enclosures. What are embedded enclosures, you ask? Simple. When people publish podcasts and videocasts, they do so by adding an enclosure tag to their feed that tells the feed reader where to find the podcast.

The next release of SimplePie will be able to handle these podcasts in two different ways. The first is the way that it currently handles them — it produces a URL that points to the podcast so that you can create a link with it and whatnot. The other way is to embed them directly into the page, so that people can listen to them without having to download and load into a separate player.

Currently, we have support for all filetypes supported by QuickTime and Flash (which should cover most types of enclosures), as well as an integrated Odeo Player for Odeo RSS feeds. You can check out some screenshots whenever you get a chance. What we haven’t yet added (but is on the list) is support for Windows Media files. This support will be added as soon as I can find a feed with Windows Media enclosures to test with. 🙂

We’re also aware of the update that Microsoft pushed out yesterday for Internet Explorer that implements the changes required by the Eolas lawsuit. Our current embedded enclosures support is affected by this change, so we’re working to update the code to bypass the warning for the benefit of Internet Explorer users everywhere.