[HN Gopher] NetNewsWire Turns 23
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NetNewsWire Turns 23
Author : robin_reala
Score : 160 points
Date : 2026-02-11 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (netnewswire.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (netnewswire.blog)
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| A nice throwback to the pre-slop, pre-engagement bait era of the
| Internet.
| tbolt wrote:
| Add pre-enshittification and that covers the trifecta of doom
| were in.
| arjunbajaj wrote:
| A truly great piece of software! Been using it for 5+ years.
|
| I think NetNewsWire is a great example of what software should
| strive for: a useful set of features, while being fast and
| smooth.
| geoffeg wrote:
| I started out with NNW and am back on it now. After Google killed
| Reader I went to Feedly, then tried a few self-hosted solutions
| and, in the end, NNW is just the easiest solution for me since
| I'm in the Apple ecosystem.
| nntwozz wrote:
| NNW is my happy place.
|
| Every time I open the app I feel like I'm back in the era of Mac
| OS X Snow Leopard and Steve Jobs is about to reveal one more
| thing.
| SSLy wrote:
| Try GoodLinks if you're looking for something that looks like NNW
| but is a reading/bookmark manager.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Hands down the best RSS reader I've used. It's fast, tiny, built
| extremely well, and has no flab. It sits in a certain class of
| application along with Alfred and a handful of others in being a
| standout example of craftsmanship that's reminiscent of the
| golden era of OS X. More apps should strive for this standard.
| xmok wrote:
| Speaking of Alfred, there's also a Raycast[0] extension for
| NetNewsWire allowing one to combine the two[1].
|
| Disclaimer: I authored the extension but like most Raycast
| extensions, it's open-source[2].
|
| [0]: https://raycast.com [1]:
| https://raycast.com/xmok/netnewswire [2]:
| https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions/n...
| tomaskafka wrote:
| I love it too, but I would still like some concept of folders,
| so that I could sort my feeds into eg. programming, design,
| hobbies, and then have a feed to match the mood.
| dallen33 wrote:
| Are you talking about NetNewsWire? There are folders, I have
| a bunch setup.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I wish it had a more accessible scripting API - I use it
| locally, and back up saved stories, but I have to directly hit
| their sqlite database to extract data out of it :/
| mmooss wrote:
| The biggest problem with newsreaders, IME, has been managing
| large numbers of feeds. Most user time is spent handling
| redundant stories - e.g., if you have feeds from many major news
| sources, for each major event you get one or more stories on each
| feed, saying mostly the same things.
|
| I haven't seen a newsreader solve that problem. Has anyone tried
| an LLM?
|
| The best solution I know is grouping redundant stories together,
| possibly hierarchically: e.g., Sports > Olympics > Figure skating
| > Jones performance. (Fewer feeds require fewer levels, possibly
| just one.)
|
| That ~ deduplicates the stories and, by displaying them together,
| you can compare and choose the coverage you like and delete the
| rest. Otherwise, IME most user time is spent sorting through
| redundant stories one at a time.
|
| But as I said, I haven't seen a newsreader do that well. It seems
| like a good fit for LLMs. Or maybe there's another solution
| besides grouping?
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I haven't used it much but I think Iconfactory's Tapestry[0]
| does some of this.
|
| [0]: https://usetapestry.com/
| dewey wrote:
| That was partially the original promise of Fever, which is the
| API many RSS services still support and that somehow lives on.
|
| Nuzzle did something similar for Twitter but shut down
| (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/05/nuzzel).
|
| That would be a good addition to feed readers, especially for
| news feeds.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My YOShInOn RSS reader uses an SBERT model for classification
| (will I upvote this or not?) and large-scale clustering (20
| k-means clusters and show me the top N in each cluster so I get
| a diversity of different articles.)
|
| For duplicate detection I am using DBSCAN
|
| https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cl...
|
| and found some parameters where I get almost no false positives
| but a lot of duplicates get missed when I lowered the threshold
| to make clusters I started getting false positives fast. I
| don't find duplicates are a big problem in my system with the
| 110 feeds I have and the subjects I am interested in, but
| insofar as they are a problem there tend to be structured
| relationships between articles: that is, site A syndicates
| articles from site B but for some reason articles from site A
| usually get selected and site B articles don't. An article from
| Site A often links to one or more articles, often that I don't
| have a feed for, and it would be nice if the system looked at
| the whole constellation. Stuff like that.
|
| Effective clustering is the really interesting technology
| Google News has had for a long time.
| benwills wrote:
| I have been attempting this exact sort of clustering solution
| for a few years now (on and off as a side project). Do you
| have source code available, or more detailed
| explanations/resources of how to approach this?
|
| Edit: I just looked around for your YOShInOn RSS reader code
| and couldn't find it. I did find a number of references it
| looks like you've made to it on various forums, etc over the
| years.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The technical report on YOShInOn is about 2 years overdue!
|
| You mean the k-means for diversity or DBSCAN for
| duplicates? Either way it is about 10 lines of scikit-learn
| code. Send me an email.
| benwills wrote:
| Both. Just sent an email. Thanks!
| emschwartz wrote:
| You should try Scour (https://scour.ing)!
|
| You specify your interests as free form text, it ranks articles
| by how closely they match, and you can consume your Scour feed
| as an RSS feed to read it in NNW.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm the developer
| dewey wrote:
| NNW + Miniflux is my favorite combination and I've been using it
| for many years.
| SSLy wrote:
| Are you using NNW as a front-end to Miniflux?
| dewey wrote:
| Yea, as I bought Reeder a long time ago on iOS and got used
| to it. They all support Google Reader / Fever API so it all
| works great and I can use Miniflux web interface to read when
| I don't have an app installed.
| eitland wrote:
| How do you combine them?
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| NNW is like a river stone tumbled smooth and with enough weight
| that it feels good in your hand
| ftth_finland wrote:
| Not to take away from NetNewsWires accomplishments, but getting
| it was such a disappointment. Adding insult to injury, I had to
| pay to get the app on my iPad. It was one of the few apps I paid
| for and all I got was a deep sense of wasted money.
|
| Since the demise of Byline, I've been rocking Inoreader and have
| had no reason to look back.
|
| All I miss is Google Reader, but that's never coming back.
|
| The only new thing I want in an RSS reader is a handsfree, voice
| only mode. Being able to listen to RSS articles and navigating by
| voice commands.
| criddell wrote:
| NetNewsWire is free.
|
| https://netnewswire.com/
| ftth_finland wrote:
| It wasn't at the time.
| criddell wrote:
| Your right! I found this[1] which says it was $10 at
| launch.
|
| So you paid $10 and helped support indie developers launch
| what, in time, evolved into an almost universally beloved
| app.
|
| That should feel pretty good. Your tiny investment helped
| create something great!
|
| [1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-
| ipad/
| dagi3d wrote:
| Doesn't Apple offer purchases refunds?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Only for the first decade.
| havaloc wrote:
| I was on Google Reader, then Feedly for a long time, until the
| Feedly iOS client just slowly degraded and got buggy. I'm not
| opposed to paying for a good RSS set.
|
| I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS
| on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just
| the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also
| really easy to install.
|
| What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on
| any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database,
| super easy.
| sp8 wrote:
| NNW definitely restored my faith in RSS readers. Amazing
| software, I just use it and sync to iCloud, works flawlessly.
| Thank you NNW!
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I use NetNewsWire locally for some stuff, but if you're looking
| for a web-based RSS reader, I can also highly recommend newsblur.
| isingle wrote:
| This is great. I have been using NetNewsWire for over 4 years,
| and I love it.
| k2enemy wrote:
| I love NNW, especially the new iteration since Brent got it back.
| Mac-assed software at its best.
|
| The other day I was searching for how to turn a youtube channel
| into an RSS feed and tried all sorts of convoluted instructions
| for finding channel IDs, etc. At some point I thought this is the
| kind of user-centric thing that NNW has probably already thought
| of, and sure enough, if you just paste in a youtube channel URL
| as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| I thought YouTube had native RSS feeds for channels?
| kevincox wrote:
| > if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW
| sorts it out and creates a feed for you.
|
| While I don't doubt that NNW has great UX, feed auto-discovery
| is a table stakes feature for any RSS client.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I wish more software was actually free and didn't need a
| subscription.
|
| We need more software that is free, open source and comes with no
| subscriptions.
| chmaynard wrote:
| I'm staying away from macOS Tahoe for now. NetNewsWire has
| already announced that they will no longer support the earlier
| 6.x release that I use. I assume that means no bug fixes or back-
| porting of new features. Sad.
| lumirth wrote:
| They update a little too slow for my taste. But, well... that's
| the cost for high-quality free software: waiting. I'm happy to
| pay said cost, and continue to recommend it to friends and family
| where I can.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| First RSS client I ever used. First for which I bought a license.
| Reeder client seduced me away while NNW was in limbo while Brent
| Simmons (creator) wasn't working on it directly. Glad he's back
| at the helm. I never unsubscribed from his blog.
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(page generated 2026-02-11 23:00 UTC)