Favourite Things: NetNewsWire
Monday, 12th September 2024
I've written briefly on here about how much I like RSS, and having finally got around to sorting the RSS feed for this site, this seems like as good a time as ever to write about my favourite RSS reader - NetNewsWire.
It's been over 11 years since Google shut down its RSS feed-reading tool, Google Reader, citing a lack of use and interest in RSS feeds. You can read all about that here
Already a decade old at that point, the RSS protocol seemed too young to be sun-setted so early in life and fortunately, as it passes 25 years old, that seems to be the case.
Increasingly RSS seems to be having something of a mini-renaissance of late. Whilst Google Reader's demise may have been seen as the precursor of the decline of RSS, it appears that removing the super-predator from the food-chain has in fact allowed the ecosystem to flourish, and today there are a host of excellent feed aggregators and readers in the market. From Newsblur, to Feedbin, to Feeder and to Feedly there's something for everyone.
Feedly has emerged as probably the forerunner amongst these offerings, sharply positioning itself as the best alternative in the aftermath of Google Reader's collapse. Now though, judging from its website it seems to be pivoting to chase the lucrative enterprise market, selling itself as a way to monitor 'threat intelligence' and'market intelligence'. Meh.
At the other end of the spectrum, the other factor driving the resurgence of RSS is the re-emergence of the open, indie web. As a way of staying engaged with a whole range of independent writers and creators doing their thing on home-made, self-funded, and often brilliant websites, RSS is unparalleled.
The ability to have a feed of content - of interesting things to read - that you develop and curate yourself, and isn't just some shit-stream of algorithmically-determined, AI-generated ad-inserted slop, is increasingly valuable.
This is where an RSS reader comes into it's own, and of the many I've tried I've long since settled in with my favourite, NetNewsWire by Brent Simmons. In keeping with the open web ethos, NetNewsWire is open source and free. So free in fact that I couldn't actually find a way to even make a donation to support the app!
On the subject of the open web, the site FAQs explain;
We support the open web. The big social networking sites are damaging society and eroding democracy - and we believe one of the ways out of this is to get our news via the open web rather than from Twitter and Facebook. NetNewsWire is part of repairing the web we lost and it's part of building the web we want. That future web should not include viral hate speech, abuse, massive corporate surveillance, or successful influence operations by hostile governments and entities opposed to democracy.
This isn't a review of the app, so I'm not going to list all it's features and/or shortcomings and compare it to the alternatives on the market.
You can use it to import all your RSS service accounts, from OldReader, Feedly, FreshRSS or wherever. Or you can do what I do and subscribe directly to individual fees and sync them all through iCloud. (Probably a good time to mention that NetNewsWire is available macOS and iOS only).
You can sort your feeds by folder, by read and unread, and you can mark articles as favourites. All the essentials that you need, and no cruft or bloat.
It's a native Mac app, written entirely in Swift, with a simple three-pane design on Mac and a clean single pane view on iOS.
It's just a great RSS reader.
In explaining why NetNewsWire is a free app, Simmons wrote;
Could the do-it-for-love era — with the creative freedom that that brings — bring us back to the days when we downloaded apps that weren’t from Facebook and Starbucks and Funded Company X, and we told our friends about our exciting finds?
I hope. I have hope.
So here's me, telling my friends about an exciting find. Go try it.