NetNewsWire 7
Brent Simmons (2025):
With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person.
I’m not retiring from writing apps — which means I’ll have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire.
It’s been 15 years since the last time I could work on NetNewsWire during weekdays (as opposed to just nights and weekends), and I’m super-psyched for this.
NetNewsWire 7.0 for Mac is now shipping!
The big change from 6.2.1 is that it adopts the Liquid Glass UI and it requires macOS 26.
Here’s the complete list of changes. I’m still on Sequoia, but from a brief test on Tahoe the Liquid Glass stuff seems to be tastefully done.
Brent Simmons (after an App Review delay):
NetNewsWire 7 for iOS 26 and up is available now on the App Store!
[…]
This version also fixes some small bugs and adds some small performance enhancements. (iOS developers might appreciate this bit: it adopts Swift structured concurrency.)
But, again, the main thing is the updated UI. It’s cool!
Previously:
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I know nearly no one would even consider it, but I wish that iOS and macOS devs just refused to implement anything in Liquid Glass. I haven't seen /anything/ that is better than it was prior to adopting it and many things are worse.
Honestly, on iOS, I think it is literally impossible to make stuff better because you have to adopt the ridiculous stretchy bouncy text fields, etc.
Maybe if devs refuse to adopt it, Apple will get the message faster. Theoretically, it would be far less work to just skip this design dumpster fire and wait until Apple regains its sanity.
If this shows anything, it's that even a tastefully done Liquid Glass implementation is still bad. I guess the odd sidebar "box within a box" design is arguable, but the shadows behind the fields (like the Search field) look bad, the huge corner radii are terrible and pointless, and the blurry text scrolling into the header makes the header text difficult to read and looks absolutely atrocious.
It's an inherently bad design system, and even the best implementation is still worse than sticking with what we had before.
No one likes Liquid Glass and everyone hopes it goes away, but in the meantime, it's important that we slightly desecrate our own hard work in order to make Liquid Glass feel validated.
