NetNewsWire 2.1 released

Wow, the outpouring of negativity here is pretty massive, and unexpected, and, for the most part, very uninformed. Reminds me of a bad habit I used to have, where I automatically deemed anything popular as bad, because of course my tastes were more evolved than the "common man," and I had to be different, y'know, more cool. Missed out on a lot of good books, movies, and television that way ...

My own thoughts about these responses:

If you'd like Spotlight searchability in NetNewsWire, let the developer know. Brent is one of the most friendly, approachable developers I've ever interacted with, and whenever I have suggested a feature (some suggestions of which have made it to the final versions), he has always been quite gracious and at least considered the option. As to whether every single other aggregator has Spotlight searchability, I can't speak to that, but I doubt it.

As to "super-slow performance," I never had a major problem with speed (considering it was grabbing feeds from, in my case, a few hundred RSS URLs), but the thing has become turbo-charged. If speed was your issue, you really need to investigate its 2.x incarnation, and its 2.1 incarnation, as the speed has just quantum-jumped. NewsGator in and of itself adds a great deal of speed (since it is then coming from one source), but even if you are not using NewsGator (if you do not have sync enabled), the speed increase is both noticeable and enjoyable.

As for "selling the app and the rest is history," did you expect Brent to build his own RSS Web account system? If not, and if he hadn't sold out, would your complaint then be that he hadn't incorporated synchronization into his product, as other aggregators now have? Brent is still obviously at the helm of NetNewsWire ... he just has better resources at his control now.

As for the mandatory NewsGator account registration, talking about making a mountain out of a molehill. You had, to parse your phrase out, a "mandatory Kagi account registration" in prior versions, by the sheer fact that you registered it. All this does is move your registration information over to the new company that now owns NetNewsWire. Nothing Big Brother-ish about it; the amount of information that NewsGator has in association with your registration is probably less than the amount of information Kagi has in association with your prior registration, since you provided them with your credit card information and so on.

The above having been said, I do imagine TUAW doesn't have to cover every point bump, just so we can avoid onslaughts of uninformed whining like we've seen here.

No.11 You said it perfect! I call on TUAW to do a poll on weather we want to see anymore posts about NetNewsWire. I be there'll be a 85-95% that votes no!! ;-)

I think TUAW should do a poll: "Do you really care to see NNW-related posts?" I get a sick feeling just seeing that satellite graphic and I've never even used the program (and never will, now). If it's such a big concern then why not put a "NNW Watch" banner in the corner of the site, you know, something I can AdBlock.

Why is every update to this program featured on tuaw? Is it really THAT big of a deal? Most of us probably don't even use it.

Kurt Williams: Exactly, this isn't Versiontracker!

Do we really have to hear about every irrelevent point upgrade and beta release for this freakin application? Christ, give it a rest already.

As anyone tried the online Ajax aggragetor Alesti? Go to alesti.org and try it - I use it within Camino and it is just fantastic, in my opnion....

I like NNW and I'm certain I'll like 2.1 just as much as 2.0. I've never been a feature hound, so I upgraded simply to get any bug fixes (not that I've run into bugs).

However, I won't be purchasing further versions of NNW no matter what the feature set, because the new version requires a mandatory NewsGator account registration before you can activate the software.

More: http://nerd.newburyportion.com/2006/05/why-i-wont-purchase-netnewswire-again

he sold the app and the rest is history (in a bad way!)...also the Sync is very unstable!

1) is it still the only RSS aggegator that is NOT spotlight-searchable, or is this in at least?

2) search "by attention" looks like those aggregators that'll flag new articles (or locate them higher in the list) according to their bayesian "linguistic" proximity with previous news you appreciated (even when "appreciated" just means "opened").

They are very efficient and not numerous to do this, and having NNW follow this is a good news.

Hervé, former NNW paid and registered user
(abandoned to Vienna because of super-slow performance in versions