BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.7.13-beta for Windows is available.

• The Download Manager is gone — all its functions are now integrated directly
• UI simplification; in particular, there is no seperate concept of a "Playlist" for Podcasts and Radio Stations — the Playlist is the Category the podcaster/radio station is placed in. We will be doing some further modifications to Sparks! to ensure that the default playlist is more sensibly
• Some significant performance enhancements (we've been testing with 2500 blogs in Sparks!). We'll have another post about this soon. These changes involve slight behavioural changes which we hope aren't too intrusive — for example, when using the "Next Blog" button (which you should be — this is your friend for reading blogs quickly) the entries aren't opened.
• Many of the attachment related "cabinets", such as "Recent Downloads" are gone. The search list takes care of this functionality now in a much nicer way.
• The "iTunes" and "Windows Media Player" items are much more functional. What's remaining is functions to clean up deleted items from the Playlists.
• A lot of non-used or obsolete functions have been disabled internally, increasing performance and reducing resource needs