A Naming Challenge

In NetNewsWire, we have a concrete Feed type that’s what you expect: it describes an actual web-based feed.

But there are other things that are feed-like in some important ways. Smart feeds, script feeds (in the future), search results, and folders.

They have some things in common: an icon, the ability to fetch articles, the ability to provide an unread count, etc. These common abilities each have a separate protocol: UnreadCountProvider, for instance.

But this is so common that we should have a single protocol that bundles these up into one.

The problem is — what should we call it?

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Maybe the right for that single protocol is Feed. If so, then what should we call the concrete type for web-based feeds?

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In the original design for NetNewsWire, five years ago, Feed was going to be a protocol. Then I started working in Swift, found that I wanted to use Set<Feed> and couldn’t, so I made it a concrete type.

I love Swift, but this limitation keeps coming up for me. I use both protocols and sets a lot, because they’re often the best choice, but in Swift they just don’t play together well.

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Update a couple hours later, at 1 pm: We’re going with a protocol named Feed and the concrete type name WebFeed for, well, web feeds. This means a bunch of renaming in the app, but I think the result will be worth it.

Remember that it’s an open source app. The marketing team is not counting on a specific deadline. Our goals are 1) app quality, and 2) making it easy for people to work on the app (which really supports the first goal).

PS The marketing team is me. :)