September 2020

From time to time, often around a new release of NetNewsWire, a person will praise NetNewsWire and, in the same breath, run down some other RSS reader.

Please don’t do this!

We’re lucky in that we have a number of very-good-to-excellent RSS readers these days. They’re all pretty different, which is cool — it means, among other things, that most people would be likely to find one that they like.

Me, I’m just happy when people use RSS readers at all! I’m happy when people step forward with the open web and not back to the outrage web of Twitter and Facebook.

But, again, let me be clear: there are a bunch of pretty damn great RSS readers these days, and I don’t want to see the name of NetNewsWire anywhere near any criticism of any other RSS readers.

The announcement on the NetNewsWire blog has the full scoop, including a download link.

This release brings parity between the Mac and iOS versions. Usually we won’t want them to get out of sync for so long, but it happened and it could happen again. (We have no compelling reason to hold up one release while we finish another.)

New features (to NetNewsWire for Mac) include Feedly syncing, a Reader view, the ability to hide read articles and feeds, swipe actions in the timeline, support for non-ASCII characters in URLs, and more.

What’s Next

We will do a 5.1.1 release with some odds and ends. A small maintenance release.

After that we’ll start releasing 6.0 test builds, which will include things like iCloud sync, special support for Reddit and Twitter, and Big Sur user interface changes. The good news is that 6.0 is really far along already — and there is no bad news. (Well. No bad news in this context, anyway.)

For NetNewsWire 6.0 we’re working on Mac and iOS at the same time. They won’t necessarily ship on the same day, but there shouldn’t be a big lag between them, either.