NetNewsWire Turns 23
netnewswire.blog
netnewswire.blog
"""
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
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??
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.
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?
Old versions work still, you can create your own. The app has had lengthy and good support — which you can extend if you choose.
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).
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
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/BundleResources/In...
> Temporarily use this key while reviewing and refining your app’s UI for the design in the latest SDKs
Or don't use the latest SDK and don't be forced "next year", but continue for many more years. Also "later" is definitely better in such cases because there is some change the design will be improved. Either way, there is no good reason to rush to be worse and cut off users if you proclaim you're into quality
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...
- 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/
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.
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.
Using openrss.org as an intermediary might work as well, but not ideal to rely on a third party for that.
While I don't doubt that NNW has great UX, feed auto-discovery is a table stakes feature for any RSS client.
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues?q=is...
you didn't say why you prefer use of the earlier version, but i'm curious.
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.
I think NetNewsWire is a great example of what software should strive for: a useful set of features, while being fast and smooth.
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.
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?
Ohhh, in NNW it goes via the FreshRSS. I had no idea, cheers. I've been using just iCloud sync fairly successfully.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Reading this from NNW via hnrss.org
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.
More and more we need RSS feeds and this is the best app for consuming them for me. Happy Birthday.
We need more software that is free, open source and comes with no subscriptions.
Brent Simmons is retired. Most app developers aren’t
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!
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.
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/
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.