News Explorer 2.1

My 2 cents on this one, this blog turned me on to News Explorer and I thank you for it.

I want to love NetNewsWire but it didn't quite work how I expected in some particular ways, News Explorer does.

Glad to see it continue to get updates, it was quiet for a while there and there were a couple bugs.

I got really disappointed with Brent after submitting a PR to implement a feature that was requested several times: printing.

https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/pull/4621

The response was … bizarre. The "modern" "forward-looking " RSS protocol user sees printing as too "archaic" and "old-fashioned".

Ever since I just can't bring myself to use NetNewsWire anymore.

Ha, and it seems News Explorer supports printing, as any textual app that respects itself should.

I switched from NetNewsWire to Feeeed after Brent refused to support filtering.

Been a big fan of News Explorer for a looong time, and have noticed how conspicuously the Usual Suspects (TM) of the Apple blogaratti / podcasteratti, your Grubers etc will go on about their love of RSS and how threatened it is and NEVER mention News Explorer (which is literally the best RSS client there has ever been for the Apple ecosystem, by a large margin), while acting like NNW is all that held RSS together on the Mac.

It's VERY cliquey.

@Jules Doesn’t seem like it has a Mac app. I read my feeds mostly on the Mac.

@Léo Natan I have never been a fan of NetNewsWire. Tried it a few times over the years and always abandoned it for other apps in the first five minutes.

However, I have to disagree with your assessment on Brent from that issue. His handling of the situation was more than stellar. You submitted a feature to his project. Without asking. A feature he does not want. Yet he still tried to find a way you could have it or a version of it, sacrificing his own vision and adding maintenance burden to himself.

As an open-source developer myself, I know all too well how right he is, there is no reason he should trust you (or any other random user) to really maintain the feature adequately and indefinitely. In fact, by your comment here and your abandonment of the app, you proved his point! All it would’ve taken would’ve been another thing you didn’t like another time and Brent would’ve been on the hook to support a feature he didn’t even write or want. If anything, in hindsight Brent’s mistake was not refusing the PR outright.

That’s not the contract I sign when I choose to open source or contribute. You make assumptions about me and that’s fine. But that’s not the issue I am complaining about. Had he not wanted it because of fear of ownership alone, that’s fine too. My problem is with his stance on printing in general, and his description of it.

OK I had to read that PR to see what this was all about. Nobody cares what I think but I gotta say kinda weird on both sides.

Does Mac OS not have a standard print API? On the flip side, does Safari Reader View not print cleanly enough? In the middle, what's wrong with export to PDF, same question as print API, I was under the impression macOS kinda handled that for you.

Apparently Brent is now retired though, and does this entirely for free, and that's one reason I gave News Reader a shot. Brent doesn't want money or responsibility, fair deal. News Reader accepts my money, and also hopefully my feature requests and bug reports.

FWIW I don't like printing things but I also think it's weird he describes it as a 90s thing. But he's also been working in software this entire time so he personally probably never needs to print anything. And when he did, it was in the 90s. But again, hit pet project so whatever.

Gotta start proofreading my posts. News Explorer, obviously.

Of course there is API. That’s what I added; wiring Apple’s printing APIs on macOS and iOS with the app’s webview (article content).

About export to PDF, I was going to do it (basically same API), but once he wrote what he wrote and the attitude, I lost motivation.

I like printing stuff. There is no reason to hatekeep that, especially with very long articles. Maybe we should burn books too, because printing press is so 19th century?

A long time ago NetNewsWire famously didn’t support trackpad gestures because Brent only used a mouse. Had he mentioned it’s unlikely this feature would be added, like in this case, I would have tried to engage him before doing any actual work. But it wasn’t open source back then so I switched to an alternative. Nevertheless, Brent raised excellent points in the PR’s comments and was very respectful.

This is open source software in a nutshell. All software I guess. As much about the people as about the code.

I don't see any problem with just implementing the standard print API. But standard open source answer, fork it I guess?

A long time ago it was said that open source software is made to scratch a particular itch, this case is a fairly extreme example.

If he doesn't want money or contributions to his project, switching or forking your own build seems the only answer.

I'm also reminded of a phrase about how sausage is made. One can only wonder about these kinds of conversations in private companies and the motivations there.