NetNewsWire 5.0 Released. If I could only teach my non-technical friends two things about technology, I would encourage them to (a) learn the keyboard shortcuts for their most-used apps and (b) use RSS to read the news.

Speaking of RSS, Brent Simmons has finally finished rewriting NetNewsWire—the storied RSS reader for the Mac. You can pick it up for free, and even if you’re not sure what RSS is, check out the link because, again, it’s one of only two things I wish more people knew about.

NetNewsWire only supports syncing via Feedbin at the moment (Feedly support is being considered), but you can also use it as a standalone RSS reader—no account required. That’s what I’m doing, and it works great. An iOS app is forthcoming, which I’m excited about because for as terrible as desktop web news reading is, it’s 10x worse on mobile.

I like to measure products against the yardstick of what they set out to do. For me, NetNewsWire scores high on all marks. It’s fast, stable, and ultimately provides a small counterargument to the notion that we have to put up with website bloat, ad trackers, and algorithmically-powered social nonsense just to read the news.

Monday, 2 September 2019