robin_reala•2d
NetNewsWire Turns 23netnewswire.blog
97 comments
  • buchanae•1d

    I love the philosophy page: 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•1d

      Their 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?

      • jxdxbx•1d

        I think it looks better (on Mac and iOS) than any other Liquid Glass app. And I can’t blame Brent for adopting it. One of the standout features of the app is just being native, not trying to re-invent the wheel with custom GUI, and taking advantage of built-in platform features.

        My favorite NNW feature is iCloud syncing: Not needing a separate RSS back-end (but of course you can use one if you want to sync with other clients).

        • eviks•1d

          > think it looks better (on Mac and iOS) than any other Liquid Glass app

          what a weird comparison, the baseline is the previous version of the app

          > standout features of the app is just being native, not trying to re-invent the wheel with custom GUI, and taking advantage of built-in platform features

          Since the previous GUI isn't custom you don't lose your standout features

          • jxdxbx•21h

            Well I think the iOS version is better! I don't like Liquid Glass on Mac though.

            • eviks•20h

              Ok, to get back to the original point: does making one of your platforms worse jibe with the quality philosophy?

      • brailsafe•1d

        That'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•1d

          > 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

          • sherry-sherry•1d

            The app has always followed the masOS design language, because the app is built using the native macOS tools. It makes sense for it to match the OS it's on, apps built with stand UI components migrated to 'Liquid glass' much easier.

            The app is open source (https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire), feel free to back-port any features or bug-fixes you would like to spend your time on.

            • eviks•1d

              It doesn't make sense because the previous version also matches the OS it's on, liquid glass degradation isn't mandatory and "much easier" is still harder than doing the better nothing.

              Your suggestion is just as senseless: among the many things wrong with such a "write the app yourself" approach, you forgot about iOS, even though it's mentioned in the original comment, where you can't freely backport anything due to distribution being locked down

              • sherry-sherry•22h

                It makes sense. Like you said, previous versions used the macOS design language at the time, and the current version does the same. The developer has chosen to no longer support older versions of macOS, they aren't required to. The old app still works, and anyone else can work on it if they want.

                > you forgot about iOS, even though it's mentioned in the original comment, where you can't freely backport anything due to distribution being locked down

                Yes you can. You can create an app today that is compatible with iOS 15.

                • eviks•20h

                  > You can create an app today that is compatible with iOS 15.

                  You forgot to address the point, which was about distribution, not creation

                  The previous paragraph is similarly irrelevant, for example, "aren't required to" - who said anything about requirements??

                  • sherry-sherry•13h

                    You create a backport just for yourself for your own device without needing the store, no distribution/App Store is needed.

                    You don't like some of the Liquid Glass stuff... fine, make something else. The old versions still work, I don't really know what you are complaining about. This level of support and polish in a free app is amazing.

                    • eviks•8h

                      > You create a backport just for yourself for your own device without needing the store, no distribution/App Store is needed.

                      It is needed, you can't install a custom app permanently on iOS. By the way, what if you only have iOS and not a Mac? How would you compile your backport?

                      > The old versions still work

                      I've already addressed it, come back with something meaningful rather than repeat

                      > I don't really know what you are complaining about.

                      I've explained it to you several times, maybe you can get that knowledge by reading the conversation carefully?

                  • jamespo•19h

                    We get it, you don't like liquid glass, neither do I. But the source is available and there are alternatives to both MacOS and netnewswire.

                    • eviks•19h

                      No, you don't get it, otherwise you wouldn't repeat/add irrelevant points to a thread filled with them

                      • jamespo•14h

                        Sure, keep whining pointlessly then.

  • cosmic_cheese•2d

    Hands 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.

    • pavel_lishin•2d

      I 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•1d

        That'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.

    • leokennis•23h

      With so many apps introducing either paywalls (requiring either login or circumvention measures) or terrible RSS feeds (with content missing, images missing etc.) I have found it necessary to use a feed reader that you can configure per-feed to open either:

      - The feed item (read the XML)

      - The site fulltext

      - The original site (in case of login required)

      For me that app is https://www.lireapp.com/

      • geoffeg•21h

        Is there some way to create this kind of experience without having to change RSS readers? Is there a service that allows you to easily create RSS feeds for websites without them? I'd rather go with a more unix "do one thing and do it well" philosophy for something like this.

        • jamespo•20h

          There’s rss-bridge which is in the ballpark

    • xmok•2d

      Speaking 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 [1]: https://raycast.com/xmok/netnewswire [2]: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions/n...

    • tomaskafka•2d

      I 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•2d

        Are you talking about NetNewsWire? There are folders, I have a bunch setup.

  • k2enemy•2d

    I 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.

    • kevincox•2d

      > if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.

      While I don't doubt that NNW has great UX, feed auto-discovery is a table stakes feature for any RSS client.

    • navanchauhan•2d

      I thought YouTube had native RSS feeds for channels?

      • xp84•2d

        It 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•1d

          At 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•1d

            Oh, 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•1d

              I think openrss.org has YouTube playlist feeds

              • onli•1d

                Yeah, quite possible. You can construct the feed by some rules, mine are here: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes/blob/4243c9234ddab6a3... - but then you have to monitor whether it still works periodically. Being able to replace that by proper meta tags would be nice.

                Using openrss.org as an intermediary might work as well, but not ideal to rely on a third party for that.

  • chmaynard•2d

    I'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•1d

      Vienna 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•1d

        Love Vienna! Been using it for years. Looking forward to updates

    • jjtheblunt•19h

      how could it be reasonable for them to indefinitely maintain an older version?

      you didn't say why you prefer use of the earlier version, but i'm curious.

    • brailsafe•1d

      I'm staying away from Tahoe for now as well, but are there any bugs in the 6.x release?

    • username223•1d

      Don'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.

  • sharkjacobs•2d

    NNW is like a river stone tumbled smooth and with enough weight that it feels good in your hand

  • geoffeg•2d

    I 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•2d

    NNW 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•1d

      When we got notifications through Growl.

  • arjunbajaj•2d

    A 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.

  • dan_m2k•1d

    This 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?

  • havaloc•2d

    I 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.

  • dewey•2d

    NNW + Miniflux is my favorite combination and I’ve been using it for many years.

    • happy_lapper•1d

      Just setup Miniflux after realising this was possible (took less than 10 minutes) - it's awesome, thanks!

    • eitland•2d

      How do you combine them?

    • SSLy•2d

      Are you using NNW as a front-end to Miniflux?

      • dewey•2d

        Yea, 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•2d

          > 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.

  • rcarmo•1d

    I’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•1d

      Me 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…

  • lumirth•2d

    They 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.

  • htk•19h

    This 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.

  • pavel_lishin•2d

    I use NetNewsWire locally for some stuff, but if you're looking for a web-based RSS reader, I can also highly recommend newsblur.

  • TheChelsUK•24h

    NNW 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.

  • thunderscore•1d

    Thank you for a prime example of quality mobile software. A joy to use.

    Reading this from NNW via hnrss.org

  • alsetmusic•2d

    First 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•1d

      I'm using the older (non-subscription) Reeder too. How does NetNewsWire compare in features today?

      • latexr•1d

        If 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.

  • incanus77•1d

    I bought it the next month (had been using Lite for a few months prior) and I'm still using it. Continuously. I mean, damn.

  • sixeyes•1d

    i 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!

  • sp8•2d

    NNW definitely restored my faith in RSS readers. Amazing software, I just use it and sync to iCloud, works flawlessly. Thank you NNW!

  • rorylawless•1d

    Happy Birthday, NNW! Such an elegant app, that does one thing extremely well. Here's to 23 more years!.

  • sleepless•1d

    Does it support Nextcloud news? Sadly that was the reason I had to switch to other readers a few years ago.

  • SSLy•2d

    Try GoodLinks if you're looking for something that looks like NNW but is a reading/bookmark manager.

  • ubermonkey•22h

    As 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.

  • isingle•2d

    This is great. I have been using NetNewsWire for over 4 years, and I love it.

  • m3kw9•1d

    Their IOS app is good, simple and free

  • OGEnthusiast•2d

    A nice throwback to the pre-slop, pre-engagement bait era of the Internet.

    • tbolt•2d

      Add pre-enshittification and that covers the trifecta of doom were in.

  • colesantiago•2d

    I 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•1d

      I also wish that other people would do work for me for free.

      Brent Simmons is retired. Most app developers aren’t

  • mmooss•2d

    The 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?

    • PaulHoule•2d

      My 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.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.

      • benwills•2d

        I have been attempting this exact sort of clustering solution for a few years now (on and off as a side project). Do you have source code available, or more detailed explanations/resources of how to approach this?

        Edit: I just looked around for your YOShInOn RSS reader code and couldn't find it. I did find a number of references it looks like you've made to it on various forums, etc over the years.

        • PaulHoule•2d

          The technical report on YOShInOn is about 2 years overdue!

          You mean the k-means for diversity or DBSCAN for duplicates? Either way it is about 10 lines of scikit-learn code. Send me an email.

          • benwills•2d

            Both. Just sent an email. Thanks!

    • dewey•2d

      That 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).

      That would be a good addition to feed readers, especially for news feeds.

    • emschwartz•2d

      You should try Scour (https://scour.ing)!

      You specify your interests as free form text, it ranks articles by how closely they match, and you can consume your Scour feed as an RSS feed to read it in NNW.

      Disclaimer: I’m the developer

      • 71bw•23h

        HSTS issue, can't access.

    • cosmic_cheese•2d

      I haven't used it much but I think Iconfactory's Tapestry[0] does some of this.

      [0]: https://usetapestry.com/

    • jillesvangurp•23h

      I've been thinking of how to tackle that problem. It would require a bit of resources but nothing too crazy. Essentially new articles need to be indexed in some kind of vector search capable DB. That allows things like similarity grouping and a few other things. This is nothing new and exactly how things like Google News work. The difference here would be keeping the per user notion of subscribing only to things they care about.

      If you do the embeddings calculation centrally, it becomes shared cost. Every new article gets analyzed only once for all users.

      The rest then becomes providing a new view on your RSS feeds that leverages that. You could do a lot of the expensive stuff (vector comparisons) locally actually because most users only have hundreds/thousands of articles that they care about. So, simply download the embeddings for articles and do the comparisons/grouping locally.

      This wouldn't be super hard to do. There are lots of OSS models that you can run locally as well. But they are kind of slow. So the trick is to amortize that over many users and share the burden.

      The key challenge here is the finances. The centralized embeddings juggling gets costly quickly and you need a revenue model to finance that. That's why most of this stuff is happening by paywalls and staying kind of niche. All the "free" stuff is essentially ad sponsored.

      But with some MCP layered on top and a few other bits and bobs, you could fairly easily implement an intelligent LLM based news agent that summarizes personalized news based on exactly your own preferences and news subscriptions. I haven't really seen anything like this done right. But we technically have all the OSS tech and models to do all of this now. It's just the compute cost that kills the use case.

      If that could be decentralized bittorrent style, it wouldn't actually be that much of a burden. Given enough users, distributing say thousands of article updates per minute among tens/hundreds of thousands of readers means each of them expending maybe a couple of seconds of compute once in a while to calculate embeddings for articles that they are pulling that don't have embeddings yet. If you make that eventually consistent, it's not that big of a deal if you don't get embeddings for all the new stuff right away. And any finished embeddings could be uploaded and shared. Anything popular would quickly get embeddings. And you could make the point that publishers themselves could be providing embeddings as well for their own articles. Why not? If you only publish a handful of articles, the cost is next to nothing.

      If I had more spare time, I might have a go at this. Sadly, I don't.

      • mmooss•18h

        It's very interesting and thanks for laying out the issues.

        One point I'd like to make: Grouping RSS feed items by similarity is much different than LLM summaries. In the former, I get the best (I can use economically), specific, expert human information, which is what I'm personally after; the latter keeps the economy but eliminates the value.

  • flyingzucchini•1d

    My daily go to! Great app

  • ftth_finland•2d

    Not 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•2d

      NetNewsWire is free.

      https://netnewswire.com/

      • ftth_finland•2d

        It wasn’t at the time.

        • criddell•2d

          Your 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/

          • SllX•2d

            Something 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.

    • dagi3d•2d

      Doesn't Apple offer purchases refunds?

      • kstrauser•2d

        Only for the first decade.

      • latexr•1d

        Not really. In the EU they make you specifically agree that you won’t ask for one (or they did, I stopped buying from the App Store many years ago). Which does feel like a failure of the law that that is even allowed. Even when they did, it was never like Steam’s “no questions asked as long as you bought it less than 14 days ago and used it for fewer than 2 hours”, it was still conditional on their approval.