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NetNewsWire: Free and Open Source RSS Reader for Mac and iOS

301 points| sogen | 3 years ago |netnewswire.com | reply

90 comments

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[+] incanus77|3 years ago|reply
NNW was the first software I bought immediately after I switched to the Mac in 2002. It was great then, had some ups and downs, and is fantastic now and 'boring' in the best possible way. Extremely stable and fast, it is the epitome of what native software on the Mac should be. And it's open source!

Also, Brent is a top notch human being. Huge inspiration to me going indie originally to write Mac software in 2006.

[+] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
Been using the newer rewrite (6.x I think) for the past couple of years and it's been great. It's lightweight, snappy, and doesn't bog down over time like many RSS reader apps tend to. Its UI is all standard AppKit/UIKit and is designed more to be useful than to look pretty or act as branding. All around great.
[+] kstrauser|3 years ago|reply
Took the words out of my mouth. It’s in my favorite category of “boring software” that chugs away, doing what it’s suppose to do, requiring no maintenance or other attention. Its UI is simple and elegant, with no missing or extra complicating features.

Thanks, NNW team! I love your work!

[+] selfhoster69|3 years ago|reply
Yup, glad there's no SwiftUI here.
[+] grahamjpark|3 years ago|reply
I’ve found that many sites these days have an RSS feed, but don’t advertise it. I’ll come across a site with no mention of it, and then just start trying urls to see if any work. For example:

/feed

/blog/rss

/rss.xml

I wager whatever content management system they’re using automatically creates it.

[+] vincode|3 years ago|reply
NetNewsWire will scan for those and find them for you. NetNewsWire has a Share extension that you can use directly from Safari or most any app that supports sharing a URL. The Share extension hands the URL off to the main NetNewsWire app that will try a series of common RSS feed locations if it can't find it as an alt link in the page source.
[+] lurtbancaster|3 years ago|reply
There are Firefox extensions that do this automatically, giving you that convenient RSS icon beside the URL, that you may then use to either read the feed directly in Firefox or copy-paste into your feed reader of choice.

Livemarks - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

Want my RSS - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

Easy to RSS - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-to-rss/

There may be Chromium alternatives too but I don't use Chromium.

[+] boxed|3 years ago|reply
Normally you can just throw the site into your reader and it will find that link automatically. So you don't have to worry about that stuff.
[+] rambambram|3 years ago|reply
Yeah, I found that too, when I was building my Really Social Sites module for Hey Homepage (a DIY website system). I think we have to mostly thank WordPress for all the existing - but unadvertised - feeds!
[+] okasaki|3 years ago|reply
Does the Google RSS Subscription extension do this kind of detection? If not, this would be good to add.
[+] Eric_WVGG|3 years ago|reply
I regularly email site-admins/support-staff when I come across that, along with the actual text of a `<link />` tag. Just about every time they come through!
[+] njsubedi|3 years ago|reply
Wow, this app has presented RSS reader as a cool new app in the market. Kudos to whoever wrote the copy for the landing page. I’m convinced to give it a try to experience a “synced” experience because I don’t have a RSS feed reader on my phone. I use Thunderbird on my mac for mail and RSS feeds because everything I need to read is right there in the same app.
[+] vincode|3 years ago|reply
Brent Simmons did the copy and is an amazing writer. He doesn't write publicly as much as he used to, but his back catalog on inessential.com is very entertaining and informative.
[+] alexchantavy|3 years ago|reply
+1 about the well written copy. What's old is new again :). Maybe people will return back to individual hobby forums/BBSs. A long time ago I used to RSS subscribe to individual forums instead of relying on FB or Reddit. I do like Reddit for the most part but hate how only recent threads have any kind of visibility.
[+] gumby|3 years ago|reply
The feature that didn’t make the jump into the rewrite for me was filters. Can you now make your own “smart feeds”? I subscribe to a lot of feeds but a bunch of predefined filters makes it quick to get to the good stuff.

Instead I use ReadKit but in its recent rewrite the filters (“Smart Folders”) didn’t make it either so I am stuck on the older version.

[+] schluete|3 years ago|reply
I'm curious, can you describe your ideas for filters/smart feeds a little more, or link to an older version of NNW that supported what you're looking for?
[+] jen729w|3 years ago|reply
Happy user here, with the marvellous Feedbin as the sync back-end.

Feedbin's website is really, really nice if you want to check your feeds on the go.

[+] themadturk|3 years ago|reply
Yes! I use Feedbin on the back end, and their site for reading on Windows. On Mac and iPhone/iPad, it's NNW and Feedbin all the way.
[+] mjmsmith|3 years ago|reply
Agreed, for me it’s the closest thing to Reeder for the browser.
[+] awill|3 years ago|reply
What’s the best cross platform solution? I use iOS, Max and Linux. Is there a good cross platform app, or maybe native apps in each with central sync?
[+] themadturk|3 years ago|reply
Pay for a Feedbin account ($5US a month). It provides the feeds for NetNewsWire on Apple devices and has a decent web interface of its own; it's how I read RSS when I'm not on a Mac or iDevice.
[+] nopcode|3 years ago|reply
FreshRSS as a self-hosted server.

NNW for Apple devices and NewsFlash for linux.

[+] xnacly|3 years ago|reply
I would probably recommend feedly, its okay but not the best
[+] thom|3 years ago|reply
Reinstalled this on iOS and resurrected my Feedly account. Bit of a wasteland to be honest. Lots of corporate feeds remain and what you would have called A-listers in the days of the peak blogosphere. But so many obscure jewels seem to have gone quiet. So it goes.
[+] aendruk|3 years ago|reply
> It’s like podcasts — but for reading.

The irony of this statement is astonishing. How did it come to this!

[+] nbzso|3 years ago|reply
Wow. I still have a license for NNW. Good for them to promote RSS. Will give it a spin:) Thanks for not binding the download only to Apple Store. The only gripe that I had with NNW is the lack of keyboard shortcuts customization.:)
[+] saltymimir|3 years ago|reply
Save for the fact that it doesn't support non-Apple platforms, NNW is pretty much perfect for me. No upsells of extra features or even a need to create an account. Just a very good, clean, and simple reader.
[+] mrzool|3 years ago|reply
The focus on just one platform is the best selling point for me. I love 100% native Mac apps.
[+] tunnuz|3 years ago|reply
This used to be my RSS reader, good times. I loved to exchange blog recommendations with friends, and spending an hour or two a day reading what people I respected wrote about topics I cared about. Social media democratized idea sharing, but it turns out that there is just too much information to digest if you have to read everyone, also of course greed got in the way and we’re not optimizing for good writing anymore, but for ad performance.
[+] john2x|3 years ago|reply
I use this to subscribe to subreddit feeds (could really be any RSS reader though). Instead of doomscrolling all the time, I get the 25 hot posts and that's it.
[+] grahamjpark|3 years ago|reply
I just got all my favorite YouTube channels added to my RSS reader (although I use Feedbin directly instead of NNW). I hadn’t thought about doing the same for Reddit!
[+] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
I use NNW on my iPad to subscribe to subreddits in split screen mode with Reddit on the other half.

You can click on the date of the subreddit post in NNW and it opens in Reddit. NNW keeps track of what I already read.

It’s like being back in the Usenet days using “nn”.

https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/eegtti/eeg_70.html

[+] ashton314|3 years ago|reply
Literally was just catching up on my feeds before hopping on HN. This app is so simple and so good. The Twitter integration is super nice too.
[+] nopcode|3 years ago|reply
The Twitter and Reddit integrations are really great.

I have all my work-related social media in NNW without the distractions.

[+] selfhoster69|3 years ago|reply
I'm using NNW with FreshRSS on my home server. Great experience across operating systems. Miss the app on Windows and Android.
[+] rrgok|3 years ago|reply
I don't like RSS much. Most of the time RSS shows me the title and sometime it can show me the body too. But I want more: I want a unified interface for the content and the comments. I wish to have a protocol/app that can fetch body and N level deep comments and show me a Firefox Reader Mode like interface.
[+] rakoo|3 years ago|reply
That's how RSS evolved into social. Let comments resurface with the salmon protocol, give some formatting with microformats, ... It's functional, but there's nothing that implements the whole stack. If you want more info on where it is today, check out https://indieweb.org/

Today this has all been superseded by ActivityPub, rethinking things from the ground up and including everything.

[+] jonwinstanley|3 years ago|reply
The save for later services such as Pocket and Instapaper are closer to this kind of thing aren't they? Put you have to save each article one by one.
[+] codepoet80|3 years ago|reply
Please check out FullTextRSS from Five Filters: https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/

They have an OSS version you can host yourself. It fixes the problem of sites not sharing their full text in their feed, by going and scraping the site into a full feed for you.