Five Things You May not Know About NetNewsWire
[Editor's note: the following is one of a serious of guest posts to appear on this blog; here, NewsGator's Brent Simmons provides you an inside look into NetNewsWire.]
1. The space bar is your friend
NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.
You can go through all your unread news just by tapping the space bar -- it scrolls the current item if it needs scrolling, or goes to the next unread item.
2. It's easy to switch tabs, or go back to the News Items tab
Here are three of my favorite keyboard shortcuts: 9 goes to the previous tab, 0 goes to the next tab, and \ takes you back to the News Items tab.
There are plenty more single-key shortcuts: choose Keyboard Shortcuts from the Help menu to see the list.
3. NetNewsWire plays Flash videos
It doesn't play Flash by default -- it's turned off because Flash is a bit crashy. But you can turn Flash on. Open the preferences window, click the Browsing icon, then click the Web Pages tab. Make sure Enable plug-ins is checked.
If you also want to play Flash videos in news items, click the News Items tab in the same window and again make sure Enable plug-ins is checked.
4. You can validate feeds
If you think a feed is mis-behaving -- especially if it's one of your own feeds -- it can be useful to find out what's wrong.
You can use the online feed validator from within NetNewsWire: just ctrl-click (or right-click) on the feed, then choose Validate this Feed from the contextual menu.
A web page will open that shows the problems, if any, in the feed.
5. Some history: NetNewsWire is six years old
The first public betas of NetNewsWire Lite appeared in 2002. The current OS was Mac OS X 10.1. There was no Safari yet, much less WebKit -- Macs still shipped with Internet Explorer as the default browser!
One of the original discarded names was AquaReader -- here's an old screenshot of the main.m file.
NetNewsWire's immediate predecessor was MacNewsWire, a very simple RSS reader that showed only Mac news. You couldn't add or remove feeds. Here's a screenshot.
Here's what the original, pre-1.0 icon looked like:
Here's what 1.0 looked like.
NetNewsWire 1.0 included a weblog editor (screenshot) that later got split out into MarsEdit, which was later acquired (and wonderfully improved) by Red Sweater Software.
NetNewsWire 2.0 (screenshot) was one of the first apps outside Apple to dispense with the left and right margins. No matter what the Human Interface Guidelines said!
By the time 2.0 came out, I was already ripping off features from my friend Nick Bradbury, whose FeedDemon was such a good app that I figured he was a Mac developer at heart. (Later we became co-workers here at NewsGator.)
Thaks for those, particularly the tab switching.
My favourite shortcut is 'L' to quickly scan entire feeds and mark them as read if nothing grabs my attention.
All these one-finger shortscuts help make NetNewsWire great!
Posted by: SteveH | October 29, 2008 at 04:21 PM
version 1.0 really looks no different. it still looks the same to this day
Posted by: Scott Mead | October 29, 2008 at 05:12 PM
All this time I've been setting down my coffee to switch tabs. You've made my day. I've always wondered if you took any inspiration from Akregator. Coming from Linux, NNW felt the best right away.
Posted by: Greg | October 29, 2008 at 06:11 PM
6. NNW is free so don't expect major updates any time soon...!
Posted by: look | October 29, 2008 at 06:14 PM
i used NNW lite but preferred vienna. when NNW became free i gave it another shot and i've never looked back - i'm addicted! if NNW went out of freeware and back to shareware i would gladly drop the money to use it again.
Posted by: darrell | October 29, 2008 at 06:26 PM
Somehow in my faulty memory, I thought I'd been using NNW since the Mac OS 9 days, but I guess not! :)
Posted by: Derek K. Miller | October 29, 2008 at 07:58 PM
The best part about NetNewsWire was how easy it was to figure out most of those keyboard shortcuts myself without ever needing to look it up or be told!
Okay, well maybe that's not the best part, but it sure speaks volumes in terms of user interface design! Props!!
Posted by: Phillip | October 29, 2008 at 08:26 PM
Love NetNewswire. On iPod, it is great, BUT needs a new feature: as you scan headlines, need a fast, instant gesture or click or whatever to indicate one wants to read that story. The workflows is thus: rapidly scan all heads, quickly mark stories of interest as you scan, get to end of nw heads, then either a/ switch to iPhone safari to read stories that are stacked up waiting to load, or b/ use iPhone Netnewsiwre browser with new enhancement that allows screen rotation to wide aspect (and lets you flag a story for clippings with one asddtional gesture)
Posted by: Cloudbase9 | October 29, 2008 at 08:57 PM
I recently spent a couple of plane trips reading feeds, which is a nice way to catch up on the news if you're traveling.
Posted by: ultimate | October 29, 2008 at 09:43 PM
I love NetNewsWire but we need a way to cope with the sheer volume of feeds we're now able to subscribe to. Could you could figure out a way to incorporate something akin to the filtering capabilities of MT-Newswatcher? That filtering made Usenet much more manageable back in the day.
Posted by: rcs | October 29, 2008 at 11:20 PM
My only gripe - well, feature request - is for some kind of news item tagging in NNW to help me find what I want in my 100s of clipped articles.
Posted by: Nev Stokes | October 30, 2008 at 02:15 AM
6. I made one of the original icons for NetNewsWire 1.0, but lost out to Bryan Bell (duh!). This was before I had a Mac, now I can finally use NetNewsWire. Thanks for the great work, I've been enjoying NetNewsWire!
Posted by: Berklee | October 30, 2008 at 02:39 AM
I've been using NNW for the last 4 years. Usually with a cup of tea in one hand! The only thing that'd be useful would be the ability to download certain feeds to be read offline in their entirety but then that's not what it's designed for...
Posted by: Joe | October 30, 2008 at 03:47 AM
Been a user for years, please make the iPhone version support landscape, and use the blue loading bar when viewing a website.
Posted by: Nick | October 30, 2008 at 04:09 AM
I have been a NNW User since my first Mac OS X Days and never looked sideways ;-)
Over all, it is a great app and got better with every update, raising an already high standard.
But I have some small gripes with the browsing implementation. Currently, I have set the preference to open links in NNW tabs. I would like to have some option, to open some links in the browser. Perhaps something in the way b or right-arrow opens link in NNW, option-b / option-right arrow overrides preferences and opens link in default browser.
Why? Sometimes I need the page to open in my browser, because thats where my Bookmarklets for URL-Shortener, Magnolia and lots of other stuffs resides.
Also, in NNW I cant use the space bar for selecting elements or pressing buttons (I use full keyboard access in Mac OS X). As these are minor, and currently my only gripes, I am still very happy with NNW.
Posted by: Henning | October 30, 2008 at 06:06 AM
One thing you may not be knowing is that I am Newsator user for the last many years.
Posted by: Sachin | October 30, 2008 at 06:17 AM
I have to admit that I love NetNewsWire but the one thing that I love about GoogleReader is the fact that I can always "sign on" to it on any computer and start reading from there.
Posted by: Elijah Nicolas | October 30, 2008 at 07:42 AM
Reading with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard right now!
Posted by: Kolbe | October 31, 2008 at 02:14 AM
Your passion and desire to get things right is obvious in the little touches that make using the product so nice.
Posted by: Jeremy Harrington | November 03, 2008 at 12:16 PM