The Future of NetNewsWire
John Gruber interviews Brent Simmons and Daniel Pasco:
SIMMONS: Yes. The fun and glory of being there on Day One [of the iPhone and iPad App Stores] was undeniably attractive. How could it not be? If I went into further details which I can’t go into, anyone would agree that I had to do it. To not go for it, both times, would have been flat-out insane.
Yet it was still a mistake. It would have been amazingly hard to say, “No, sorry, I can’t do it.” It would have gutted me and disappointed other people that I wouldn’t want to disappoint. But it would have been the right thing to do. I just didn’t know it then.
NetNewsWire is one of my favorite Mac apps ever, however I’ve found that I don’t enjoy reading feeds on iOS (in either NNW or other readers). This is both because of the limitations of the smaller touch devices and also because Google Reader syncing has not worked well for me. So I prefer to “process” feeds on the Mac and send longer articles to Instapaper for reading on iOS or Kindle.
I have little experience with Black Pixel, but I’m glad to hear that they have big plans for NetNewsWire, and I’ll anticipate whatever Brent does next.
Trivia: NetNewsWire, Daring Fireball, Mac OS X Jaguar, SpamSieve, and this blog all debuted within about a month of each other in the summer of 2002.
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Your Google Reader syncing issues could be attributed to NetNewsWire. For some reason NNW doesn't seem to finds feeds as read when going across devices. I now have Byline on my iPhone and Reeder on iPad and those work fine. NNW on the Mac still doesn't mark the feeds as read. I can't wait for Reeder Mac to come out.
"Trivia: NetNewsWire, Daring Fireball, Mac OS X Jaguar, SpamSieve, and this blog all debuted within about a month of each other in the summer of 2002."
Heady days. That's the month when I stopped dual-booting and went over to OS X.
And now the big cats are reaching maturity, and these should be even headier days, but the specter of the AppStoreMonster casts a dark shadow...