NetNewsWire Turns 23

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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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.