6/24/2023 0 Comments Netnewswire browser mobileWould it be cool to go beyond that? Absolutely. NetNewsWire has a very basic capability: you can create "smart lists" which pull news items from different feeds you already subscribe to. I'm not sure what the value is to Yahoo - unless it's attention data, learning more about what feeds people read, what they filter in, what they filter out, etc. What are your thoughts on feed parsing utilities like Yahoo Pipes? Is there a future here? My obsession is the entire economy of news. I'm obsessed with how news circulates: with what people do with it once they have it, where it goes, how it gets to someone else, how someone else decides to read it or not. Will NetNewsWire 4.0 add a fifth big change? I'll say this: I'm obsessed with how people get their news, with what helps, what slows people down, what's too difficult, what's overload, what's not enough. The fourth big change was actually adding a mobile client, NetNewsWire for iPhone. For the sake of NetNewsWire users I needed to be already in the position of being able to do cross-platform syncing. Though the NewsGator acquisition happened way back in 2005, I was already convinced that NetNewsWire users would be using mobile devices of some kind (whether from Apple or not I didn't know), and that mobile would be huge. It wasn't just syncing that was important, but syncing across different RSS readers running on different platforms. The third big change was adding NewsGator syncing. The weblog editor, most notably, was transformed into a separate app: MarsEdit, now in the wonderful care of Daniel Jalkut. At the same time, we also stripped out some other features that didn't belong. Based on the feedback I've had over the years, I conclude this is something people love. I was sure that it would need this feature - and I was correct, though there were some people telling me it was a bad idea. The second was when NetNewsWire 2.0 shipped: we included a built-in tabbed browser. It was a huge hit for the time, way surpassing my expectations. The first was its very existence - the first desktop app RSS reader for Mac OS X. NetNewsWire has gone through several big changes in its seven-year lifetime. Anything you can talk about that will build some more excitement? I see on Inessential that version 4.0 of NNW is coming up. It isn't a replacement, but it is becoming my new "first click". I am finding for the first time I am using Tweetie/Tweetdeck/Twitterific as much as NNW to get a my favorite site feeds. I am interested in what you are doing with NNW. And so there are lots of people glad we made the change. For the year-and-a-half before switching to Google Reader, the biggest feature request *by far* was that we switch over to Google Reader syncing. It's funny - the pissed-off people always speak up, and happy people usually happily keep quiet. Were you surprised? What went into that decision? But it will be just one piece of code.Īlthough many customers were vocal opponents of your decision to go to Google Reader as an online reader/sync solution, I think it turned out pretty well. For instance, soon I'm hoping to get posting to Facebook working in TapLynx and NetNewsWire for iPhone. The situation is such that I couldn't really say where I spend most of my time. I'm less and less involved with directly creating apps for other people. Often I'm working on two or three at the same time when I'm working on a given piece of code. TapLynx is a framework for people who want to make iPhone apps like the All Things Digital app.Īll three products are closely related, of course: they share code, and they're all feed readers. I have three products: NetNewsWire for Mac, NetNewsWire for iPhone, and TapLynx. Is that where you spend most of your time now? Or does NNW keep you busy? I've noticed you've done a few high profile apps - like AllThingsD. But it's many orders of magnitude beyond that. So I tend to think of it as relatively intimate: me and 100 friends. I kind of have to forget about how popular it is most of the time or I'd be paralyzed knowing that I can't possibly please that many people. How many copies of NNW v3 are out there (if you don't mind me asking)? It is one of the first things I put on a new Mac and I wonder how many other people use it as a default application? The 1.0 of NetNewsWire Lite was in late 2002 You got it - NetNewsWire 1.0 was in early 2003. First thing: I've been a huge fan of your software for as long as I can remember (I think it went 1.0 in 2003?) Thanks for taking time away of your busy development work to chat. I thought it would be interesting to talk to Brent Simmons, the developer behind NetNewsWire, about the recent changes in the application, how he plans on integrating social services like Twitter and where development is heading.
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