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NetNewsWire Turns 23
- OGEnthusiast 9mo agoA nice throwback to the pre-slop, pre-engagement bait era of the Internet.
- tbolt 9mo agoAdd pre-enshittification and that covers the trifecta of doom were in.
- arjunbajaj 9mo agoA truly great piece of software! Been using it for 5+ years. I think NetNewsWire is a great example of what software should strive for: a useful set of features, while being fast and smooth.
- geoffeg 9mo agoI started out with NNW and am back on it now. After Google killed Reader I went to Feedly, then tried a few self-hosted solutions and, in the end, NNW is just the easiest solution for me since I'm in the Apple ecosystem.
- nntwozz 9mo agoNNW is my happy place. Every time I open the app I feel like I'm back in the era of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Steve Jobs is about to reveal one more thing.
- pantulis 9mo agoWhen we got notifications through Growl.
- SSLy 9mo agoTry GoodLinks if you're looking for something that looks like NNW but is a reading/bookmark manager.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo agoHands down the best RSS reader I've used. It's fast, tiny, built extremely well, and has no flab. It sits in a certain class of application along with Alfred and a handful of others in being a standout example of craftsmanship that's reminiscent of the golden era of OS X. More apps should strive for this standard.
- xmok 9mo agoSpeaking of Alfred, there’s also a Raycast[0] extension for NetNewsWire allowing one to combine the two[1]. Disclaimer: I authored the extension but like most Raycast extensions, it’s open-source[2]. [0]: https://raycast.com https://raycast.com [1]: https://raycast.com/xmok/netnewswire https://raycast.com/xmok/netnewswire [2]: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions/netnewswire https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions/n...
- tomaskafka 9mo agoI love it too, but I would still like some concept of folders, so that I could sort my feeds into eg. programming, design, hobbies, and then have a feed to match the mood.
- dallen33 9mo agoAre you talking about NetNewsWire? There are folders, I have a bunch setup.
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoI wish it had a more accessible scripting API - I use it locally, and back up saved stories, but I have to directly hit their sqlite database to extract data out of it :/
- Dracophoenix 9mo agoThat's the issue with most RSS client I've used. The feeds are portable but the data and metadata aren't. I wish there was a permanent solution to this problem.
- mmooss 9mo agoThe biggest problem with newsreaders, IME, has been managing large numbers of feeds. Most user time is spent handling redundant stories - e.g., if you have feeds from many major news sources, for each major event you get one or more stories on each feed, saying mostly the same things. I haven't seen a newsreader solve that problem. Has anyone tried an LLM? The best solution I know is grouping redundant stories together, possibly hierarchically: e.g., Sports > Olympics > Figure skating > Jones performance. (Fewer feeds require fewer levels, possibly just one.) That ~ deduplicates the stories and, by displaying them together, you can compare and choose the coverage you like and delete the rest. Otherwise, IME most user time is spent sorting through redundant stories one at a time. But as I said, I haven't seen a newsreader do that well. It seems like a good fit for LLMs. Or maybe there's another solution besides grouping?
- cosmic_cheese 9mo agoI haven't used it much but I think Iconfactory's Tapestry[0] does some of this. [0]: https://usetapestry.com/ https://usetapestry.com/
- dewey 9mo agoThat was partially the original promise of Fever, which is the API many RSS services still support and that somehow lives on. Nuzzle did something similar for Twitter but shut down (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/05/nuzzel https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/05/nuzzel). That would be a good addition to feed readers, especially for news feeds.
- PaulHoule 9mo agoMy YOShInOn RSS reader uses an SBERT model for classification (will I upvote this or not?) and large-scale clustering (20 k-means clusters and show me the top N in each cluster so I get a diversity of different articles.) For duplicate detection I am using DBSCAN https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cluster.DBSCAN.html https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cl... and found some parameters where I get almost no false positives but a lot of duplicates get missed when I lowered the threshold to make clusters I started getting false positives fast. I don't find duplicates are a big problem in my system with the 110 feeds I have and the subjects I am interested in, but insofar as they are a problem there tend to be structured relationships between articles: that is, site A syndicates articles from site B but for some reason articles from site A usually get selected and site B articles don't. An article from Site A often links to one or more articles, often that I don't have a feed for, and it would be nice if the system looked at the whole constellation. Stuff like that. Effective clustering is the really interesting technology Google News has had for a long time.
- dewey 9mo agoNNW + Miniflux is my favorite combination and I’ve been using it for many years.
- SSLy 9mo agoAre you using NNW as a front-end to Miniflux?
- dewey 9mo agoYea, as I bought Reeder a long time ago on iOS and got used to it. They all support Google Reader / Fever API so it all works great and I can use Miniflux web interface to read when I don’t have an app installed.
- SSLy 9mo ago> Google Reader / Fever API Ohhh, in NNW it goes via the FreshRSS. I had no idea, cheers. I've been using just iCloud sync fairly successfully.
- eitland 9mo agoHow do you combine them?
- happy_lapper 9mo agoJust setup Miniflux after realising this was possible (took less than 10 minutes) - it's awesome, thanks!
- sharkjacobs 9mo agoNNW is like a river stone tumbled smooth and with enough weight that it feels good in your hand
- ftth_finland 9mo agoNot to take away from NetNewsWires accomplishments, but getting it was such a disappointment. Adding insult to injury, I had to pay to get the app on my iPad. It was one of the few apps I paid for and all I got was a deep sense of wasted money. Since the demise of Byline, I’ve been rocking Inoreader and have had no reason to look back. All I miss is Google Reader, but that’s never coming back. The only new thing I want in an RSS reader is a handsfree, voice only mode. Being able to listen to RSS articles and navigating by voice commands.
- criddell 9mo agoNetNewsWire is free. https://netnewswire.com/ https://netnewswire.com/
- ftth_finland 9mo agoIt wasn’t at the time.
- criddell 9mo agoYour right! I found this[1] which says it was $10 at launch. So you paid $10 and helped support indie developers launch what, in time, evolved into an almost universally beloved app. That should feel pretty good. Your tiny investment helped create something great! [1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-ipad/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-ipad/
- SllX 9mo agoSomething to keep in mind is while it’s the same developer, the ownership history of NNW had a few rocky years. At some point Brent Simmons started work on an entirely new RSS reader he was at the time calling Evergreen, intended only for the Mac at that point, and eventually he got the rights to NetNewsWire back. So there’s a break point between NetNewsWire the commercial software and NetNewsWire the open source project. In many ways, the new NetNewsWire is a solid improvement, but it’s also missing a lot of features that the old NetNewsWire had since it was no longer his day job and he rethought a lot things. I don’t share the parent’s feelings but I can get why some people would still be a tinge salty about it, cuz for a period of time there NetNewsWire was pretty much in limbo, Brent was the developer but for most of its commercial life it was under the auspices of NewsGator and one of the companies that was supposed to keep it going (Black Pixel I think? It’s been a while and I’m going mostly off the dime here) basically didn’t do shit with it. This was around the time of the run up to NetNewsWire 4.0. I think only NNW 4.0 Lite ended up shipping, and that was around the time the parent was paying $10.00 to run a version on his iPad for software that was from a reasonable customer’s perspective, entering its life support era. And then of course Google Reader was killed in the night a couple of years later, a sacrifice for Google+, and anybody still running NetNewsWire no longer had any good syncing options. That NetNewsWire was abandoned, and is still dead, but yes, the new one is pretty great. So your positive spin doesn’t really land here. Not for anybody that was around at the time.
- havaloc 9mo agoI was on Google Reader, then Feedly for a long time, until the Feedly iOS client just slowly degraded and got buggy. I'm not opposed to paying for a good RSS set. I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also really easy to install. What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database, super easy.
- sp8 9mo agoNNW definitely restored my faith in RSS readers. Amazing software, I just use it and sync to iCloud, works flawlessly. Thank you NNW!
- cgfjtynzdrfht 9mo ago[dead]
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoI use NetNewsWire locally for some stuff, but if you're looking for a web-based RSS reader, I can also highly recommend newsblur.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- isingle 9mo agoThis is great. I have been using NetNewsWire for over 4 years, and I love it.
- k2enemy 9mo agoI love NNW, especially the new iteration since Brent got it back. Mac-assed software at its best. The other day I was searching for how to turn a youtube channel into an RSS feed and tried all sorts of convoluted instructions for finding channel IDs, etc. At some point I thought this is the kind of user-centric thing that NNW has probably already thought of, and sure enough, if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.
- navanchauhan 9mo agoI thought YouTube had native RSS feeds for channels?
- xp84 9mo agoIt does - I think the praise being sung was just that you don't need to know how to construct them. YouTube doesn't have a little orange rectangle "RSS" link to click, or anything.
- k2enemy 9mo agoAt one point (when I first tried this) I'm pretty sure youtube didn't have a link to an rss feed in the source. I had grown used to going to source and searching for "rss" and "xml." However, I just checked and they definitely do have a link now!
- onli 9mo agoOh, thanks for the hint! I might be able to remove some code from my feed detection code (on pipes) then. But on a first glance, it seems like alternate links for channels are back, but playlists are missing. Still, that might be a step forward.
- trekz 9mo agoI think openrss.org has YouTube playlist feeds
- colesantiago 9mo agoI wish more software was actually free and didn't need a subscription. We need more software that is free, open source and comes with no subscriptions.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoI also wish that other people would do work for me for free. Brent Simmons is retired. Most app developers aren’t
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- chmaynard 9mo agoI'm staying away from macOS Tahoe for now. NetNewsWire has already announced that they will no longer support the earlier 6.x release that I use. I assume that means no bug fixes or back-porting of new features. Sad.
- josh64 9mo agoVienna will support older MacOS releases for longer. Our development has been slow the past couple of years due to maintainers having big life changes. Things are about to pick up so keep an eye out!
- yougotwill 9mo agoLove Vienna! Been using it for years. Looking forward to updates
- username223 9mo agoDon't be sad! NetNewsWire has been my newsreader for well over a decade, and I only consider "upgrading" out of idle curiosity, because the version I have now does what I want, and does it well. The version treadmill is a machine producing only sadness.
- brailsafe 9mo agoI'm staying away from Tahoe for now as well, but are there any bugs in the 6.x release?
- chmaynard 9mo agoGitHub reports that there are 242 open issues labeled "Bug". https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20type%3ABug https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues?q=is...
- trumpdong 9mo ago[dead]
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- lumirth 9mo agoThey update a little too slow for my taste. But, well… that’s the cost for high-quality free software: waiting. I’m happy to pay said cost, and continue to recommend it to friends and family where I can.
- alsetmusic 9mo agoFirst RSS client I ever used. First for which I bought a license. Reeder client seduced me away while NNW was in limbo while Brent Simmons (creator) wasn't working on it directly. Glad he's back at the helm. I never unsubscribed from his blog.
- Telemakhos 9mo agoI'm using the older (non-subscription) Reeder too. How does NetNewsWire compare in features today?
- latexr 9mo agoIf you use Reeder’s in-app browser, NetNewsWire (at least v6, last I tried) is a non-starter. It can only direct websites to open in the browser.
- rorylawless 9mo agoHappy Birthday, NNW! Such an elegant app, that does one thing extremely well. Here's to 23 more years!.
- buchanae 9mo agoI love the philosophy page: https://netnewswire.com/philosophy.html https://netnewswire.com/philosophy.html """ We believe that apps should never crash. They should be free of bugs. They should be fast — they should feel lighter-than-air. We believe that quality is more important than just piling on features; we believe that quality is the most important feature. And we believe that high quality is transformative — it makes for an app you never hesitate to reach for. You can rely on it, and you do, again and again. This makes us slow to add features. We are adding features — but never at the expense of how it feels. Never at the expense of reliability and speed.
- eviks 9mo agoTheir new version 7 implements the lower quality design of liquid glass while also blocking all ios versions below the latest (so you can't get bug fixes and slow features with the better design). How does that fit the philosophy?
- brailsafe 9mo agoThat's a tough one, but considering it's only the 7th major version to come out in 23 years, I'd say that's a fairly safe place to demarcate backwards compatibility, considering that it's (probably) a fairly major UI overhaul on both iOS and Mac. Despite the poor quality of the OSes themselves, it's just a small studio, gotta pick your battles carefully. You can still use the version you're using, and if you ever upgrade to the new OS you can get the new version, seems reasonable enough to me
- eviks 9mo ago> gotta pick your battles carefully Ok, and how is wasting time making the design worse to follow the OS instead of spending that time implementing missing features a carefully picked battle? I thought the philosophy was prioritizing quality > You can still use the version you're using Which would be missing bug fixes and those slow features the may be added next year
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- sleepless 9mo agoDoes it support Nextcloud news? Sadly that was the reason I had to switch to other readers a few years ago.
- thunderscore 9mo agoThank you for a prime example of quality mobile software. A joy to use. Reading this from NNW via hnrss.org
- flyingzucchini 9mo agoMy daily go to! Great app
- m3kw9 9mo agoTheir IOS app is good, simple and free
- incanus77 9mo agoI bought it the next month (had been using Lite for a few months prior) and I'm still using it. Continuously. I mean, damn.
- dan_m2k 9mo agoThis makes me really happy to see this non social media, non algo part of the internet going from strength to strength. Having deleted my socials and regained some time, I’ve just got a small skeleton of the sites I used to read left in my phone’s favourites. Despite all the wrongs of Facebook, et al, I have lost some channels and stories that I used to consume there. How do users of readers like NNW discover new stuff? Just picking stuff up or do the apps support discovery?
- rcarmo 9mo agoI’m not crazy about the Liquid Glass look. I decided to stick with Reeder Classic until it dies, even if it’s nice to see a well maintained alternative…
- b__d 9mo agoMe too. Unfortunately, it seems Silvio has abandoned further development. There are some truly annoying bugs (YouTube embeds do not work, swipe gestures stopped working, iOS images are slightly cut off,…) :( But I tried all alternatives and can't make the transition after idk, 8 years…
- sixeyes 9mo agoi love it, no idea it was 23 years old! however, i found it doesn't abide by some "no new content, back off for a bit" part of the protocol. i've had two feeds refuse to be added because it sends multiple requests during discovery, i think. kind of a bummer!
- TheChelsUK 9mo agoNNW has been a stalwart app on all my devices and home screens for a long time. It just works. More and more we need RSS feeds and this is the best app for consuming them for me. Happy Birthday.
- ubermonkey 9mo agoAs a lifelong nerd in my mid-50s, I've accumulated a number of pieces of software that I love -- like, I really have actual emotional fondness for -- that for whatever reasons I no longer use. NNW is 100% on that list. It was my first feedreader, but at some point I shifted away from it (I think there was a time when it wouldn't sync with other services?), and now for years I've been using Feedbin's web client on my Mac instead of anything native because it's surprisingly solid. (On iOS, I use Reeder.) But NetNewsWire is still awesome. I'm glad it's there, and I'm grateful that Brent and Sheila Simmons are out there making excellent software.
- htk 9mo agoThis is THE reader of RSS feeds if you're in the Apple ecosystem. It's so good to still find new feeds to subscribe to now and then. My latest is the newsletter from Retro Game Corps. Pure nostalgia fun right on my NetNewsWire apps.