5 questions with Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire

Hot on the heels of releasing NetNewsWire 3 Brent Simmons, developer and creator of said program, sat down with me in the virtual HQ of TUAW (a.k.a. the Internet) and answered my questions five. Read on to hear what Brent has to say about NNW's new UI, the feature he would have liked to have included, and what apps are most often in his Dock.TUAW's questions are in bold, and Brent's answers follow them.

What new feature in NNW 3.0 is your personal favorite? The one you find yourself using all the time?

I think my favorite is probably the Attention report, since it lets me know what feeds I don't like so much, so I can
unsubscribe from them.

It goes against my best interest to say this, but I'll say it anyway: unsubscribe! Not from the good feeds, but from the feeds that aren't updating anymore or that you don't really like that much.

I'm down to 87 feeds, myself. It's the first time in more than five years that I've had less than 100 feeds. I'm trying to unsubscribe from one a day.

If this sounds negative, it's not meant to -- it's meant to be liberating. Our job, after all, isn't reading news, it's creating things. We can subscribe to fewer feeds and trust in our various webs and circles to make sure we get all the news that's important.

It seems that line between web apps and traditional desktop apps is blurring more and more, what with Google Gear bringing Google Reader offline. What do you think NNW has to offer that someone can't find with a webapp?

Local storage. Spotlight searching. AppleScript support. The richer UI. Things like a standard customizable toolbar, or cmd-comma to open your preferences window, all the consistencies of Mac apps. Avoiding the network latency -- as cool as Ajax is, it's still a trip to a server and back.

My personal favorite thing is connecting to other apps. NetNewsWire can send HTML email via Mail. You can post to del.icio.us using Cocoalicious or Postr or other app. It can send news items to VoodooPad and Twitterrific; it sends podcasts to iTunes. It adds contacts to Address Book and calendar events to iCal. It supports a common clipboard format that other newsreaders and apps support.

My all-time favorite bit of app-to-app communication is how NetNewsWire lets you choose a weblog editor such as MarsEdit or ecto. Whenever you want to post something to a weblog, it's a piece of cake -- just click a button or hit the keystroke and the item opens in your weblog editor, ready for editing.

But, beyond all the reasons, for me it's like this: I was a web developer for years -- more years than I've been a desktop app developer -- and I'm a big fan of web apps. But I also dig Cocoa, and I especially love the places where the web and the desktop intersect, in browsers and feed readers and weblog editors and Twitter clients. It's kinda boring to argue
advantages of web vs. desktop. I just happen to really love this particular space, this kind of app.

While Google might start with a web app and move toward the desktop, and someone else might start with a desktop app and move toward the web, where you end up is still this cool crossroads where the best brains are at work.

In fact, it was just a month or so ago when I wrote on my weblog about "the end of desktop vs. web apps."

You spent a good deal of time working on the revamped UI for NNW 3.0. What was the toughest UI choice you had to make? The easiest?

They're all tough decisions. The hardest thing may be nuking the stuff I think is cool but that nobody else likes. On the other hand, that may be the easiest thing, because the only person disappointed is me.

If you could have watched me, over a period of a few weeks last fall, move the tabs to the right, then to the bottom of the window, then to the left, turn them into a weird grid, put them in a floating window, move them to the top, then below again, all the while changing how the thumbnails and buttons are drawn, and having shadows and not having shadows, and having blue backgrounds and not, and even, one night, a weird diagonal striped background -- if you could have watched all that, right before perishing from boredom you would have said, "Hey, this guy's having a tough time figuring out the tabs."

But that's the way I am with everything. I have to try it all.

What is the one feature you wanted to include in this release but just couldn't get it in?

It's a small thing: Combined View pagination. It should work kind of like search results, where it has multiple pages. This prevents the situation where it has to render 500 items at once, which takes more time than rendering just 10 or 20 items.

I got part of the way there, but didn't have time to complete the feature. So it's a high priority for 3.0.1.

Doesn't sound like a big deal, I know, but that was one thing I so totally wanted to get done.

Finally, what are some apps other than NNW that you use all the time?

I'm a Cocoa programmer, so I use Xcode all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I don't really like it, or if it's just like that I don't like IDEs. Programmers are intelligent people and sophisticated computers users, so you'd think that they would be more productive and happier with a literate interface instead of all this heavyweight point-and-click madness. You'd think they would demand it.

I'm also in Terminal a lot. I also use MarsEdit, iTunes, VoodooPad, Camino, Mailsmith, Mail, BBEdit, Twitterrific, and iCal. I've got SpamSieve running in the background. And GrowlTunes. I hardly ever chat, but when I do use Adium and Colloquy. A few minutes ago I uploaded NetNewsWire 3.0 using Transmit.

One of the things I love about being a Mac developer is getting to meet the folks who make the apps I use. In a way, my /Applications folder is also my social network. Which is cool.

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Source: http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/

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Hot on the heels of releasing NetNewsWire 3 Brent Simmons, developer and creator of said program, sat down with me in the virtual HQ of...

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stubblechin

Wow. The number of people reporting huge problems with NNW 3 in this thread, including beach balls, crashes, and flakiness, kind of takes me aback. It runs like a dream for me and always hasâ€”I've been using it since it was a hazardous alpha with zero issues. (Well, one weird bug that finally went away by itself, where a certain item in a certain feed kept marking itself unread for no reason). Anyway, I'm not trying to say that the people reporting problems are in any way mistaken, but maybe it has a lot to do with your Mac and your feeds. For me, at this moment in time, it runs like a dream and always has, under a very heavy load of feeds (over 200, and exactly 6776 unread items right now. Maybe I'll take the advice above and start unsubscribing).

June 09 2007 at 3:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Joel

Well, I upgraded today. I saw the blog entry in NNW 2.0 :-) I haven't been using the new features yet. I'm getting used to the interface changes. I really appreciate Brent's code-sharing with the Cocoa community! It's helped me a lot! I thought buying his software would be a good way to say "Thank you" but NNW has changed my life! So I have to say "Thank you" again, Brent!

June 06 2007 at 3:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Danny Choo

Switched from Netnewswire after having the need to access my feeds from home and work.

June 06 2007 at 3:22 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris

I was nervous about the upgrade. I am a heavy NNW user. It is one of 2-3 core productivity apps that my day revolves around.

I found the new version to work flawlessly and am thrilled by the new tab view, the "cover art" view of the current feed, and all the various new UI tweaks.

I've tried switching to Google Reader, and it is fine, but NNW continues to be my choice over any other RSS tool out there. FWIW - I paid for a copy in 2003. Every update since has been free, and as I understand it they will continue to be free through 2009. (? correct me if I am wrong somebody.) Can you name another product that can say the same? Amazing. (Sure - I love the open source movement, but this app is a piece of art and subjecting it to group-think would likely ruin it.)

Kudos Brent! When you were bought out my heart sank, but this proves that independants CAN still thrive in bigger companies. You continue to be my favorite Mac app developer.

June 05 2007 at 5:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris

This version is a major step backwards. The original reason I chose NetNewsWire is because its database could gracefully handle large numbers (thousands) of retained news items. The new version has abysmal performance with large numbers of items. It's only really usable if you have NetNewsWire delete items that are more than a few days old. That kills one of the program's key advantages.

Also, there are usability issues. In widescreen view, you have the tabs on the right and are not willing to use keyboard shortcuts, you have to move the mouse all the way over to the right of the screen to close a tab, then move the mouse all the way over to the left to choose the next item to read. It's tedious. There is no option to put the tabs on the left, which would minimize mouse movement, nor is there an option to put a close tab button on the toolbar, which would also work to reduce mouse movement. There are also very few available toolbar buttons to customize the toolbar.

I'm going to look for alternatives.

June 05 2007 at 4:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

E1M7

It loads my subscriptions then makes the computer totally unresponsive (beachballs) for a couple of minutes and then crashes. After the crash everything is still slow as balls with mdimport running wild.

Hope I can find NNW2 somewhere and that my db hasn't been "upgraded" (ie hosed).

June 05 2007 at 2:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Krishna

NNW 3.0 runs like buttah on my Macbook Pro. Gorgeous looking as well. Kudos to the developer!

June 05 2007 at 1:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

paul

Thanks Brent! So far so good for me. This is one of my favorite aps, and I use it much more than a browser (it's like iPhoto to Photoshop--I use iPhoto to find and organize, and then only dive into the heavyweight application when I need to).

I'm typing this in NNW3 on PB 1.5, and it's not having any beachball problems, or anything else yet (and I consider myself a power user when it comes to NNW). Additionally, for me, it's running quite a bit faster than NNW2.x. However, with V2.x it would always slow down after being open for weeks, so we'll see how this compares.

As for Google News--yeah maybe when I'm on my work PC, but the UI and features of NNW blow Google out of the water. And every RSS reader in the PC world.

Cool Man!

June 05 2007 at 1:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jack

Nice interview, shame about the product! Beachballs and crashes here too, not to mention that NNW 3 completely hosed my unread counts - I went from about 100 to over 1,000 unread items after the upgrade, so it's going to take hours to go through each feed checking what I have and haven't read. Command key combinations also fail for no apparent reason, giving an error beep instead of working, it failed to remember my old settings for stuff like column widths, and Growl notifications repeat ad infinitum until I restart Growl.

This really takes the shine off the new features, which are for the most part really excellent - maybe an over-reaction, but the old NNW was so wonderfully solid and reliable, it's a shock to get such a flaky new version. Time to write a lengthy bug report email, I guess...

June 05 2007 at 1:15 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jeroen

update: deleted old folder user/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire
fired up 3.0 again and now it's alright

June 05 2007 at 12:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply