After the customary delays (even worse than my worst estimates this time :-), the new version 2.5 of activeRenderer is now available for download.

Here is a quick summary of activeRenderer 2.5's new and upgraded features.

Plain text rendering: activeRenderer now renders regular text documents in addition to OPML outlines and RSS news feeds. It even renders dot-head format files, for nostalgia's sake.

Word documents rendering: in addition to plain text, activeRenderer now renders Microsoft Word documents - .doc files. For this feature to work, Microsoft Word has to be installed on the system running the Radio/activeRenderer application.

Automatic importing feature: any text or Word document dropped, saved or modified in aR's new www/imports folders is automatically rendered as an OPML document in the matching www/outlines folder. This triggers its upstreaming as DHTML on the public site.

Audio transclusion: the transclusion mechanism in activeRenderer now recognizes several audio file formats when processing OPML link attributes: ".mp3", "m4a" (Apple), ".wav" (Microsoft) and ".mid" (MIDI). These audio links are rendered in the outline's DHTML version with a new 'speaker' wedge.

Clicking the speaker wedge creates a small player object under the linking node, sized according to the linking node's width. The audio content starts playing. You can control the sound output through the player object.

This should be helpful to poscasters who are publishing show notes in OPML format using Radio with activeRenderer, or are using the activeRenderer web service.

Importing feeds from mySubscriptions.opml: activeRenderer's outline browser now has a new import button at the bottom of its news feed list [screenshot]. Clicking import, you can locate a subScriptions.opml file on your local system or on the Web [screenshot], and ask activeRenderer to automatically add all the feeds of that file into Radio's aggregator: mass subscription!

Registration is back: It's optional, works fast [screenshot], the server side processing is simple and hosted in NYC. Registration is a first step in getting to know activeRenderer users, something that is very important in any community driven project. So please take a few seconds to register once aR 2.5 is installed.

Complete release notes are available on the ar-announce Yahoo group. Indeed, ar-announce and ar-support have been the places where most of the action took place these past months. In an effort to take better advantage of RSS publishing, I will publish more detailed information about each aR 2.5 new feature on this channel in the coming days.