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A visual history of NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is, as Second Gear's Justin Williams says, "the elder statesman of the Mac OS X platform." Brent Simmons' newsreader has appeared on countless "must-have" app lists, and it was one of the most treasured pieces of Mac software since even before anyone outside of Cupertino knew the iPhone was going to exist. On the third birthday of his app, Today, Williams takes a nice look at NetNewsWire, both how it has worked visually over the years, and how it has grown along with the platform and stayed relevant for so long. The app originally started as MacNewsWire -- there were only a few set Mac news feeds, and no Safari, WebKit or Core Data implementation (because those things, you know, didn't actually exist yet). Over the years, the app has both grown and become more tightly focused, aimed at both what users have requested and, of course, Simmons' own vision of what the app is supposed to be. We've talked with Simmons before about translating the app over to iOS, but this is an excellent look back at NetNewsWire's history, and it's a great guide for how to keep a Mac app strong and popular for a long time.
Is the Apollo News Reader defunct?
I liked the Apollo New Reader for iPad. It allowed you to read RSS feeds full screen, something that the Pulse news reader doesn't do in landscape mode. Another advantage was that it could usually play video from within the app. Note: One of our sharp commenters notes that you can play a video in Pulse by holding the play button down for more than 2 seconds. Cool. Alas, good things come to an end; the Apollo News Reader is no longer listed in the App Store, and the freshest stories are 6 days old. The iPhone version of the app is also M.I.A. I recently reported that the app was not updating, but the developers said they expected to have it back up soon. The issue seemed to be some disagreements with some content providers over whether Apollo could use their material. There hasn't been any response from the developers on this latest outage, so if I could hazard a guess I'd say that the app won't be back. There is nothing on the Hawthorne Labs website that would give me any insight into what's going on. Once billed as "the Newspaper of the Future," for now the Apollo app doesn't seem to have any future at all. I hope it comes back, but I'm not holding my breath.
NetNewsWire 3.1.2 is out
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.
TUAW Podcast #11
It is time once again boys and girls for the TUAW Podcast. On this latest episode #11, Laurie A. Duncan and I got down to business discussing Apple's recent stock options investigation results, Steve's confirmed keynote for Macworld 07 as well as the event's doubled size, the upcoming new .Mac webmail and whether it's important, the growing passion for RSS readers and what I like to call Adobe's Universal Blunder™.The podcast (or for all y'all Leo supporters out there: netcast) in MP3 format (I know: we're working on support for an enhanced version) weighs in at just under 35MB and 38:08, and it's available from our TUAW podcast feed in the iTS, or right here. Enjoy.Update: we also have a dedicated podcast RSS feed for the non-iTS users out there: http://podcasts.tuaw.com/rss.xml.
