Probably the single most used application on my Mac is NetNewsWire, and so I've been really looking forward to on the iPhone optimized version. It has now appeared and on first glance it appears that developer Brent Simmons has built yet another class leading RSS reader.
Like the desktop version NetNewsWire for iPhone (iTunes link) syncs with the Newsgator servers for your subscription list, clippings, and read/unread status. And like the desktop version it's free. However, if you're like me you're not going to want your entire feed list on your iPhone. Fortunately, there is a way to use a desktop browser interface on Newsgator.com to select only a subset of your feeds to appear on your iPhone. Brent explains how to set this up at his site.
Check out this gallery for a a quick tour of this great mobile version of NetNewsWire.
Are you so addicted to RSS, Mail, and Twitterrific that you just can't stand when your screen saver launches? Status Screen Saver might just be the screen saver for you. The awesome thing about this screen saver is that is displays your current unread Mail count, unread NetNewsWire feeds, and even unread tweets from Twitterrific. You can select a screen saver that you have installed in the Status Screen Saver options.
Even better, Status Screen Saver allows you to (with some AppleScripting) create your own "modules" which opens up unlimited possibilities to what can be shown in Status Screen Saver. So, if you use something other than the supported applications, you can (if the application is scriptable) make an AppleScript to give a number, then place it in the Screen Saver.saver/Contents/Resources/ directory.
Overall, this is a really cool screen saver which can be expanded upon by the user. You can download this free (donations accepted) screen saver by visiting the developer's website.
Here at TUAW, we rather like Brent Simmons' excellent (and now free) news-reader NetNewsWire. Not only does it make a lot of our lives easier by managing our feeds, but the syncing with NewsGator's other online and Windows desktop clients mean that we're (sadly) never far away from the news. If you too are a fan of NNW, then you'll probably want to know about the release of NetNewsWire 3.1.2, fixing (amongst other things):
'I-see-nothing' bug which displayed an empty window for some users
Entity decoding in <link>s
much more aggressive removal of read items from their folders
a few syncing bugs
One other addition is the First-run Assistant, which will likely be seen by "[NetNewsWire] Lite users and people returning to NetNewsWire from a several-year absence." Simmons has discussed the particulars of this assistant on his own blog, and it's a fascinating read for those interested in the nuances of interface design. The update weighs in at just 5.6MB, and is available from the NewsGator site.
RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is becoming an ever more popular way to read online content quickly and without having to visit individual websites. As RSS feeds becomes more popular, so do the RSS readers that allow you to access the feeds. In my opinion, the two best RSS readers on the Mac are NetNewsWire and Vienna. Now that NetNewsWire costs the same as Vienna (i.e. nothing), what better time to take a look at what each has to offer?
Wow. I don't know who hadn't bought NetNewsWire yet, but if you haven't, consider your wait vindicated: most of Newsgator's products, including NNW, Newsgator Online, and FeedDemon (the Windows version of the popular RSS reader) have all gone free with version 3.1.
Brent Simmons, NNW's creator, is reportedly happy about the change, to say the least, and Newsgator isn't any less thrilled themselves-- they say that not only are they excited to spread the love around to everyone, but that they'll also be using "attention data" collected from the software (which hopefully sounds more ominous than it is... right?) to "deliver a better experience for everyone." Not so happy might be the folks who've paid for the products in the past-- Newsgator is offering an automatic refund to anyone who purchased them in the past 30 days, but anyone before that just has to live with the fact that they paid $30 to use the software at the time (not that it was a bad deal back then anyway). Those who subscribed to the Newsgator Online service will run out their current subscriptions, and then continue on without charge.
Version 3.1 of NetNewsWire features an updated interface with new toolbar icons, some performance and memory enhancements, and the ability to archive news items as HTML files, viewable in any browser. It is now available, for a completely free download, over on Newsgator's site.
Blogger Shawn Blanc has written an exhaustively thorough review of NewNewsWire (We interviewed Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire, over the summer). He begins with a description of how he first became aware of the application and goes on to describe a history of the UI, his "favorite things" about NNW and concludes with an exploration of the paid version.
Note that Shawn intends to give other popular applications, like Coda, SuperDuper! and Transmit, the same treatment. We can't wait.
Well color me surprised - after trying a few convoluted methods for exporting some of my NetNewsWire feeds in a format that Safari could import (as RSS, not HTML links to real sites), I finally realized that either Brent Simmons and/or Apple have already done some of the heavy lifting. If you toggle Safari's Show All Bookmarks view from the Bookmarks menu (or simply use ⌥⌘B), you can simply drag and drop one or multiple selected feeds from NetNewsWire into Safari's bookmark editing window. Unfortunately, you can't drop a Group of feeds from NetNewsWire, but this trick should satisfy most users who need to get some feeds into Apple's browser.
When you import feeds into Safari like this, it won't recognize them as true RSS feeds (or begin downloading headlines and displaying unread counts) until you visit them at least once. After that you're all ready to roll with a few (or all?) of your favorite NetNewsWire feeds in Safari.
If you use a desktop-based RSS reader other than NetNewsWire, be sure to let us know if this same trick works for your reader.
A while back David opined about eight apps he wanted on the iPhone and number one on his list was a old TUAW favorite, rss reader NetNewsWire. Well that hasn't happened yet, but Newsgator (which owns NNW) has announced an iPhone optimized version their web based newsreader at http://m.newsgator.com. What's significant about this, of course, is that like the regular web based Newsgator, this mobile version can be synced to NetNewsWire to preserve your feeds and read/unread state. So if you're an iPhone using NNW junkie you may want to check it out.
ThinkMac has announced that their RSS newsreader, NewsLife, has hit 1.0 and come out of beta (and as you can see above, they couldn't have chosen a better site to show it off with, if I may say so myself).
David did a quick rundown on the app last week, and found it to be "a simple, streamlined app for reading your favorite news sites and blogs." There is a cool feature called the News Bin, which seems like an easy drag-and-drop clipping interface. The obvious comparison to NewsLife is NetNewsWire, of course, but NewsLIfe appears to be filling the role of the simpler, cheaper (€12, or about $16 US) alternative to that old favorite. You can pick the 1.0 release up right now from ThinkMac. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Not many people are familiar with how flexible and shareable your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions are, so I thought it was time to elaborate a little and play with Automator again.
First on our sharing list: the ability to embed an automatically updating list of your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions into your website or blog. To enable this, simply sign into your NewsGator account (if you're using NetNewsWire 2.1.x or 3.x I believe you automatically get at least a 1-year NewsGator subscription) and go to Settings > Edit Locations. Assuming you have syncing with NewsGator enabled, you should see at least one location related to your NetNewsWire feeds which should have a 'Blogroll' option listed. Clicking on that will give you all the options you need to embed a small snippet of code in your site to create a list of the subscriptions you want to share publicly.
There is another way to share your NetNewsWire subscriptions in a handy-dandy file format, easy for friends, family and visitors to download and import into just about any newsreader they use, including NetNewsWire, Google Reader and even Vienna (this is technically referred to as an OPML file, with the extension .OPML). NetNewsWire offers a File > Export Subscriptions command, but there are a few options involved and this isn't very automation-friendly. If you want to make your subscriptions available to, for example, website visitors or simply back them up on a regular basis, I put together two very basic, two-step Automator apps (packaged as zip files) that can work fine on their own or easily be incorporated into larger workflows.
Brent Simmons has earned a spot in our docks for years now with NetNewsWire, perhaps the premiere RSS reader on the Mac. But Brent loves developing Mac apps, and he's a big fan of the platform in general. Funny how that works. Mr. Simmons was kind enough to sit and chat with Scott about the WWDC keynote, his competition and some cool new features in NNW3.
Hot on the heels of releasing NetNewsWire 3Brent 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.
The NetNewsWire 3.0 beta is now over. That's right, RSS junkies, NNW 3.0 is now publicly available. I've been using NetNewsWire 3.0 since Macworld 2007, and it has really come together in the last few months. There are lots of new features, including:
Growl support
Spotlight integration
Twitterific support
A New UI
Performance enhancement (this sucker screams on Intel Macs)
Improved Tabbed browsing
Microformat support
That's just the tip of the iceberg in regards of to new features. Check out Newsgator's website for all the details.
NetNewsWire 3.0 is available now and costs $29.95. Upgrading is free, if you have the NewsGator Online Premium Package. NetNewsWire Lite, the free version of NNW, is still a work in progress.
Since I solved a number of the issues plaguing my Mail account setup - including a workaround to kinda use Gmail over IMAP (more on that soon) - I have sunk my teeth back into Apple's excellent email client. Now I'm pretty happy with using a few plug-ins like Scott Morrison's stellar MailTags 2 and Stefan Schüßler's Mail.appetizer (which we have previously mentioned at length here and here), though I am continually surprised by the number of plug-ins that endow Mail with everything from better support for Windows Office attachments, to creating events from messages and even more fine-toothed Smart Mailboxes for your Address Book contacts. One only needs to run a search for Mail at MacUpdate to see what I'm talking about, but I figured I could round up a few of these plug-ins just to give you an idea.
We here at TUAW are unabashed fans of NetNewsWire, the best of class newsreader for the Mac. That much you probably knew already, however, you might not know that NewsGator has just released an Alpha of NewNewsWire 3.0 (which brings us up to 3.0a8). Check out the release notes to get the full run down on what's new in this version. My favorite new additions? Here they are:
Send to Twitterific for posting stuff to Twitter (another TUAW favorite)
Probably the single most used application on my Mac is NetNewsWire, and so I've been really looking forward to on the iPhone optimized version. It has now appeared and on first glance it appears that developer Brent Simmons has built yet another class leading RSS reader.
Are you so addicted to RSS, Mail, and Twitterrific that you just can't stand when your screen saver launches? 
Here at TUAW, we rather like Brent Simmons' excellent (and now 
Wow. I don't know who hadn't bought NetNewsWire yet, but if you haven't, consider your wait vindicated: 
Blogger Shawn Blanc has written an 
A while back David 
Not many people are familiar with how flexible and shareable your NetNewsWire / NewsGator subscriptions are, so I thought it was time to elaborate a little and play with Automator again.
The NetNewsWire 3.0 beta is now over. That's right, RSS junkies, 
Since I solved a number of the issues plaguing my Mail account setup - including a workaround to kinda use Gmail over IMAP (more on that soon) - I have sunk my teeth back into Apple's excellent email client. Now I'm pretty happy with using a few plug-ins like Scott Morrison's stellar 
