I’m working on NetNewsWire 3.2 for Macintosh (and also still working on the iPhone version, worry not). Part of planning is figuring out what features I can delete.

Deleting features has always been a big part of the way I work on NetNewsWire — in some ways, it’s my favorite part, since clutter is the death of software.

(Recall that NetNewsWire 1.x included an outliner and a weblog editor! The outliner got deleted, and the weblog editor got split out into MarsEdit — which, by the way, has a cool new release today. And plenty of other features have been deleted along the way.)

Today I sent an email to my beta testers list with my ideas for features to delete. I welcome feedback, of course — agreements, disagreements, and other ideas for features to delete — though I don’t have time to reply. (I have to spend my time working on the software itself, rather than emailing about it. ;)

Here’s the list:

- Microformats (I bet I could delete them and no one would notice)

- Automatic enclosure downloading -- nuke it (use iTunes!)

- Full Screen command

- Sites Drawer

- FTP syncing (already deprecated)

- Sort (news items) by Arrival Order (it's weird, because there's no Arrival Order column, and sort by Date is already the default)

- Remove ability to turn on/off icons and favicons in subs list (they'd always show)

- Remove ability to turn on/off sort animating in subs list (animating would be on)

- Remove ability to show/hide styles menu (it would always show)

- Remove Add Author to Address Book (which I bet nobody uses)

- Remove subfolder for each feed option in Downloading prefs; don't make "NetNewsWire Enclosures" folder -- people complain about both, so I'd just make it flat

- Remove Combined View's "Collapse read items at startup" pref -- it would be on, no way to turn it off

- Remove the weird pref for "When going to next and previous unread items" -- it would always "Respect expansion state of the Subscriptions List"

- Remove the HTML News Archive feature -- which I bet nobody uses