NetNewsWire Technotes Added

I’m writing some documents about NetNewsWire’s code and architecture. In part because I believe this is a good practice for any software project — but even more because I want NetNewsWire to be completely knowable by anybody who’s interested.

It’s one thing to have an open source app, and quite another to have one that anybody — even, or especially, new programmers — can read about and come to understand.

I don’t claim that every decision I’ve made is brilliant. In fact, some are just okay, and some might be bad. That’s fine! But it’s a real, working app, and I like the idea of having explanations of how it works and why it works that way.

I’ll be posting links on this blog as I write them. Note that the tech notes are part of the repo, and they appear in the workspace tree, so everybody who checks out the code has a local copy always at hand.

Two new ones today:

Accounts — notes about the accounts system. (The “On My Mac” thing is an account; later you’ll be able to add accounts for Feedbin and other systems.)

How NetNewsWire Avoids Parsing Feeds — talks about using Conditional GET and other methods to avoid parsing feeds.

PS My favorite, though written quite a while ago, is the Coding Guidelines.