inessential by Brent Simmons

What I deleted from NetNewsWire 3.2

Here’s the list of what I deleted from NetNewsWire 3.2:

- Microformats

- Sites Drawer

- Add Author to Address Book

- Command to turn on/off icons and favicons in subs list

- Command to turn on/off sort animating in subs list

- Command to show/hide styles menu

- Combined View's "Collapse read items at startup" pref

Not everything on the initial list was deleted, which is normal. (It was a list of things to consider deleting, after all, not a set-in-stone list.) All the feedback I got was very helpful — thanks to everyone who took the time to write to me.

Important note about the last four items: the features still exist, but now as “hidden” prefs that you can set in the Terminal. These aren’t the first hidden prefs, nor will they be the last, I’m sure.

In the end, NetNewsWire was slimmed down by almost a megabyte (mostly resources, but some code too), and the menus and preferences are a little smaller.

My favorite thing was deleting the microformats parsing code. Any CFXML-based code should be nuked. (I have no inside knowledge about CFXML being deprecated or anything — but it should be.)

It also means a slight performance boost when opening news items and web pages, as NetNewsWire now doesn’t look for embedded microformats. (It still looks for feeds in web pages, though, of course.)

I also really liked deleting the Add Author to Address Book command. As Mike Lee said, “In terms of interface unity, ABMultiValue might just be the worst class in Cocoa. Why should querying the Address Book yield a collection seen nowhere else in the entire API?” Oh yes, it was nice to delete this code.