I think NetNewsWire is a great example of what software should strive for: a useful set of features, while being fast and smooth.
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.
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 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.
Disclaimer: I authored the extension but like most Raycast extensions, it’s open-source[2].
[0]: https://raycast.com [1]: https://raycast.com/xmok/netnewswire [2]: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions/n...
While I don't doubt that NNW has great UX, feed auto-discovery is a table stakes feature for any RSS client.
We need more software that is free, open source and comes with no subscriptions.
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?
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.
You specify your interests as free form text, it ranks articles by how closely they match, and you can consume your Scour feed as an RSS feed to read it in NNW.
Disclaimer: I’m the developer
Nuzzle did something similar for Twitter but shut down (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/05/nuzzel).
That would be a good addition to feed readers, especially for news feeds.
For duplicate detection I am using DBSCAN
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cl...
and found some parameters where I get almost no false positives but a lot of duplicates get missed when I lowered the threshold to make clusters I started getting false positives fast. I don't find duplicates are a big problem in my system with the 110 feeds I have and the subjects I am interested in, but insofar as they are a problem there tend to be structured relationships between articles: that is, site A syndicates articles from site B but for some reason articles from site A usually get selected and site B articles don't. An article from Site A often links to one or more articles, often that I don't have a feed for, and it would be nice if the system looked at the whole constellation. Stuff like that.
Effective clustering is the really interesting technology Google News has had for a long time.
NetNewsWire 1.0 for Mac shipped 23 years ago today! 🎸🎩🕶️
Here’s where things are on this particular February 11: we just shipped 7.0 for Mac and iOS, and now we’re working on NetNewsWire 7.0.1.
After a big release, no matter how careful we are, there are often some regressions to fix and tweaks to make right away, so we’re working on those. Here’s the milestone with the current to-do list.
Big picture: we still have a lot of bugs to fix, lots of tech debt to deal with, and lots of polish-needed areas of the app. With Brent’s retirement last year we’ve been able to go way faster on dealing with all this. We plan to keep up the pace.
Here are our current plans:
For NetNewsWire 7.1 we’re focusing on syncing fixes and improvements.
NetNewsWire 7.2 doesn’t have a focus yet. Could end up being UX fixes and polish, could be something else. Could be a potpourri, though we do prefer having a focus when possible.
We don’t have a NetNewsWire 7.3 plan yet — that’s too far out. Depends on what actually happens with 7.1 and 7.2, and it depends on what Apple adds to our to-do list at WWDC this year. (Touchscreen Macs? Folding iPhones? Big new Swift features? Who knows!)
Note that we do add and remove tickets from milestones at any time — none of this is set in stone, of course.
It’s NetNewsWire’s birthday, but that’s a day to look forward, not to look back. The very best versions of NetNewsWire are still to come!
Edit: I just looked around for your YOShInOn RSS reader code and couldn't find it. I did find a number of references it looks like you've made to it on various forums, etc over the years.
So you paid $10 and helped support indie developers launch what, in time, evolved into an almost universally beloved app.
That should feel pretty good. Your tiny investment helped create something great!
[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-ipad/
You mean the k-means for diversity or DBSCAN for duplicates? Either way it is about 10 lines of scikit-learn code. Send me an email.