Decision: Not Publishing NetNewsWire 3.x
The last build of the full version of NetNewsWire, before the sale to Black Pixel, was 3.3.2. I’ve learned that lots of people still use it!
I was considering publishing the source on GitHub and/or making a 3.4 build that strips out the Esellerate and Google Reader syncing parts.
So I sent the code to Daniel Jalkut, who quickly hacked at it and got it running and sent it back to me.
And then I ran it too — and quickly realized a few things:
- It has lots of bugs. Bugs that would be difficult to fix without rearchitecting critical parts.
- It uses WebView a ton, which is deprecated, and replacing use of WebView with the new WKWebView would not get us the results we want. (The Combined View wouldn’t survive, for one thing.)
- It would be an attractive nuisance — some people would focus on this while I’d rather the focus be on NetNewsWire 5. I care about history, but not at the expense of the future.
I might still make a build of NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 available. That code base is not just newer than 3.3.2, it’s just plain way better.
(It was the start of my never-completed NetNewsWire 4 rewrite. NetNewsWire Lite 4, when it shipped, had zero known bugs, and just one known bug within a couple weeks. It was a good app. With modern tools I bet I could find more bugs pretty easily, though.)
But it’s still not nearly as good as the code I’m working on now. (Which should be no surprise — it’s years later, and I’m a better developer.)