inessential by Brent Simmons

Things you may not know about NetNewsWire 3.1 (part three: subscriptions list stuff)

More stuff you may not know about NetNewsWire (also see parts one and two)...

Choose to sync or not at subscribe time

If you use NewsGator syncing, you can choose whether or not to sync a feed when you’re subscribing. There’s a Sync this feed checkbox on the subscribe sheet.

(Note: there ought to be a way to change your mind later. There isn’t, yet, but it’s on the to-do list.)

Big list of built-in feeds

NetNewsWire comes with a categorized list of feeds you can subscribe to. Choose View > Show Sites Drawer to see it. Lots of great stuff in there.

Cmd-F does a Find

To do a find in the subscriptions list or Sites Drawer, type cmd-F to open the Find panel. (Sure, I’d like a filter-style find—it’s on the to-do list too.)

Easy expand/collapse folder(s)

Collapse a folder: , key. Expand a folder: . key. Collapse all folders: ; key. Expand all folders: ' key.

Sort feeds

You can sort feeds by name, unread count, attention, or last update. Or you can organize them manually. See View > Sort Subscriptions By.

Sorting is animated. You can turn off animation. You can also tell it to sort only inside folders, but leave the top level organized manually.

Validate feed

To validate a feed, select it, then pull down the gear menu (lower-left corner of the window) and choose Validate this Feed.

Per-feed settings

There are a bunch of things you can set on a per-feed and per-folder basis. Select a subscription, then type cmd-I (or choose Window > Info).

Select multiple feeds

If you select multiple feeds, all the news items from those feeds will be listed in the headlines view.

Contextual menus

You can ctrl-click (or right-click) on a subscription to get a contextual menu.

Search engine feeds, tag feeds

To subscribe to a search engine or tag feeds, see the File > New Special Subscription menu. Search engine feeds are great if you want to see all mentions of a certain keyword on the web. (For instance, you might watch for feedback about your product.) Tag feeds are similar, but follow tags—for instance, you might like Paris, and so you subscribe to a feed that shows all pictures posted to Flickr with the tag Paris.

Easy unsubscribing

Select a subscription and hit the Delete key to unsubscribe.

Turn on/off Latest News, Flagged Items, and Clippings display

You can show or not show each of the Latest News, Flagged Items, and Clippings subscriptions—see View > Show Latest News Subscription and similar.

Don’t read the brown feeds

If a feed turns brown, that means it hasn’t updated in a couple months. You might want to unsubcribe from it. You can find other non-updating feeds: see Window > Dinosaurs.

Turn on/off icons and favicons

You can turn off the display of icons and favicons in the subscriptions list: see the View > Subscriptions menu.

Subs status view

The rectangle button at the very bottom-left of the window opens and closes the NewsGator-News/Thumbnail view. The gear menu is a contextual menu for the selected subscription. The status view (the bit with the text) changes what it displays if you click on it. (Probably should be a popup menu instead.) While downloading, you can click on the status view to open the Activity window.

You can also open the Activity window via Window > Activity.