
NetNewsWire 5.0 – Open-Source RSS Reader for Mac - BooneJS
https://thesweetsetup.com/netnewswire-5-0-relaunches-as-an-open-source-rss-reader-for-the-mac/
======
gigatexal
And there’s a podcast with John Gruber about it:
[https://overcast.fm/+B7NA72wCE](https://overcast.fm/+B7NA72wCE)

------
rvz
I've settled with Vienna (another open source RSS reader for Mac) for quite
sometime after trying out many RSS readers on Mac. I've ignored electron-based
RSS readers, but after trying out NetNewsWire, migration from Vienna was just
a export and import away and that was it. I couldn't be more happier with
using NetNewsWire on my MacBook.

> (We’re also working on an iOS version.)

I am seriously looking forward to this. Syncing from iOS and Mac would make
sense here.

~~~
george_perez
Syncing will likely be limited to the third-party sync, I believe.

~~~
fallenhitokiri
News Explorer is doing a great job syncing between macOS and iOS without third
party service, I hope NNW follow that model

~~~
pantulis
Yeah, News Explorer is breaking new grounds here. News Explorer's price point
is somewhat high but it makes up for it avoiding subscription costs.

And technically it does it really well. The FAQs in News Explorer support page
try to explain some issues that can arise but I've never found them (my Mac
Mini always running News Explorer at home and use it from my iPad, iPhone, and
two laptops).

------
vzaliva
I've used NNW for years and it was fantastic! If you looking for desktop RSS
reader look no further. Switching back to Linux forced me to look for
alternatives and I ended up with Feedly. There were complaints at first but
after a while, I came to the conclusion that web app is a better choice for
RSS reading than stand-alone. The modern browsers privide sufficient UI for
implemnting a full-featured RSS reader, and since the most of contents is
rendered in HTML, having a reader inside a browser vs. having a browser inside
a reader makes more sense. Opening new links in tabs also plays well: you
navigate over one dimension (tabs) vs. two (apps+tabs).The bottom line is that
I want to encourage you to consider web-based RSS reader.

------
masklinn
RSS-wise, is there any "accumulating" / persistent / offlining RSS client?

I read a fair amount of serials these days, and while most notify updates over
RSS (though not necessarily with a full-text feed), neither generic RSS
clients nor offline readers (e.g. pocket, instapaper, …) are really built for
multi-updates works, the ability to browse across chapters, re-read a work, …

I guess an option would be to collect updates into ebooks, but there it's not
quite clear how various epub readers handle updates (e.g. can I point the
reader towards a URL and it'll check for updates on its own, do I have to
update manually, do updates only work through proprietary storefronts?)

~~~
hendersoon
You can install full-text RSS yourself at the URL below. They also offer a
hosted solution for €4 per month.

[https://fivefilters.org/content-only/](https://fivefilters.org/content-only/)

I personally pay for and recommend a hosted RSS service called Bazqux, and
they host the FiveFilters full-text RSS service for their customers.

[https://bazqux.com/](https://bazqux.com/)

[https://ftr.bazqux.com/](https://ftr.bazqux.com/)

~~~
masklinn
I don't know if I failed to explain things correctly or if you just missed it,
but that certainly does not seem to help much.

The core issue is not partial feeds, it's — as the first paragraph describes —
the ability to collect and collate feeds into persistent offline-available
books (for lack of a better word).

Having full-text feeds don't really do anything when the feeds are still
ephemeral, mixed together, to be sent to a separate reader for any sort of
offline permanence, and basically unavailable for later (also offline) re-
reading. The RSS feed of a serial is a way to get update notifications, it's
not a feed of articles which become outdated once you've read them.

~~~
lou1306
I think RSS are the wrong starting point for such a task. They may syndicate
limited content, may contain ads, etc. So I guess you want to collate the
_posts_ rather than the feed entries themselves.

Personally, I "solved" a similar issue of mine (collecting posts I want to
read in a weekly EPUB and send them on my Kindle) with Pocket and a web
service called Crofflr. (Notice Crofflr seems to be under no active
dedelopment, but in my experience it just works). I guess Instapaper offers a
similar service, but I never tried it. You can automate the RSS-to-Pocket (or
other read-it-later service) part with tools such as If This Then That. Hope
this helps.

~~~
masklinn
> I think RSS are the wrong starting point for such a task. They may syndicate
> limited content, may contain ads, etc. So I guess you want to collate the
> posts rather than the feed entries themselves.

Certainly.

> Personally, I "solved" a similar issue of mine (collecting posts I want to
> read in a weekly EPUB and send them on my Kindle) with Pocket and a web
> service called Crofflr.

Interesting. That is sort of the things I've considered, however each serial's
feed really is a single work being updated (mostly append-only I guess, I
don't know how many serials authors go back and significantly rework previous
entries) and I don't know how well epubs and their clients deal with updates /
additions (without intermediate proprietary storefronts).

I really need to knuckle down and play with epub, seeing how googling around
doesn't seem to yield anything useful.

> You can automate the RSS-to-Pocket (or other read-it-later service) part
> with tools such as If This Then That.

"RSS to pocket" isn't really the issue, going through my RSS feed, reading the
regular entries and sending the serials to pocket isn't much of a drain /
difficulty. The issue is mostly that serial entries can accumulate rather fast
in pocket (especially for those with small frequent entries e.g. one of the
defunct serials I used to follow would publish a page per day), and so pocket
is a mess of interspersed normal articles to read later and chapters from
dozens of serials. Because of that I regularly find out I've skipped chapters.

------
cyberpip
Just want to mention self-hosted rss app tt-rss ([https://tt-
rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/)). It can publish to a feed URL itself if you
want, or just use the tt-rss app.

~~~
eddyg
And tt-rss works great with Fiery Feeds[0] (along with many other RSS sync
services)... Fiery Feeds is an outstanding RSS client for iOS.

[0][https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-rss-
reader/id11587...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-rss-
reader/id1158763303)

------
jray
I use viennaRss:

Vienna is a free and open-source RSS/Atom newsreader for macOS
[https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss](https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-
rss)

~~~
mobilio
Another Vienna user here.

------
konart
Still can't find (not that I really want to) anything better than ReadKit.

Most of the readers can't fetch the whole article when rss has only an excerpt
(or do ot poorly). This is a must for me.

------
BrunoBernardino
I’m curious if no one is interested in reading less of RSS feeds, effectively
curating them and only reading them once a day.

A few years ago I had over 300 feeds in Google Reader, and even migrated them
to Feedly and Reeder, but eventually I ditched them to my most important 10
and built something to get any new things only once a day (won’t link here so
people don’t think I’m spamming).

~~~
ScottFree
I'm interested in something similar. I currently tame various firehoses by
using regex filters in QuiteRSS. That makes switching to NNW a non-starter
right now.

But, both of these readers still make the assumption that I want to keep a
feed reader open all day every day to check feeds and interrupt me when new
ones come in. I'd like something that runs on a server and emails me a link to
an rss "digest" once a week. I currently imagine that digest being a
"newspaper" stream where the full content of every feed item is listed in
chronological order. You can skip ahead to the next item with 'n' if you don't
want to finish the item you're on.

I'm sure I'll get around to building it one day.

~~~
BrunoBernardino
That’s basically what I built, and I very much prefer to read that way. It’s a
lot calmer.

You can find the link in my website, if you’re curious.

Edit: major difference there: I don’t download the content, just link to it.

~~~
ScottFree
Cool! I found it. The site's down. :(

~~~
BrunoBernardino
Hmm, which one? [https://focusd.co](https://focusd.co) should be working

~~~
ScottFree
That's the one. "This site can’t be reached. focusd.co unexpectedly closed the
connection." in chrome. It works in firefox and safari.

~~~
BrunoBernardino
So I've been debugging this and I'm not really sure what's up with that.

I can reach it via Chrome, and analyzing via multiple tools, all report things
are fine, except for downfor.io (
[https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/focusd.co](https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/focusd.co)
):

\-
[https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime](https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime)
\- [http://currentlydown.com/focusd.co](http://currentlydown.com/focusd.co) \-
[http://downforme.org/is-focusd.co-down-today-for-
everyone](http://downforme.org/is-focusd.co-down-today-for-everyone) \-
[https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b3bb6faf9400000](https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b3bb6faf9400000)
\- [https://www.ionos.com/website-checker-
result](https://www.ionos.com/website-checker-result) \-
[https://www.site24x7.com/check-website-
availability.html](https://www.site24x7.com/check-website-availability.html)

:/

~~~
BrunoBernardino
So I got in touch with the owner of [https://downfor.io](https://downfor.io)
and he was super helpful in order to get me to discover an issue with my SSL
setup in Chrome < 71 (I'm currently on 77). I got it working now, hopefully
for everyone!

@ScottFree please reach out to me, I'd love to pay you back somehow for making
me discover this problem!

------
kmfrk
Here's another super specific request: are there any RSS readers that

1) Support both Windows and macOS

2) Can import a Fever database

Moving from Fever is a pain which keeps me on my usual host, but it'd be great
to migrate it somewhere else, preferable something self-hosted. I also think
my license is tied to a specific domain to make matters even more annoying.

~~~
sirn
>2) Can import a Fever database

It has been a while since I used Fever, but I remembered it being able to
export OPML files, which most feed client should be able to import.

~~~
kmfrk
OPML is easy enough; I'm talking about the database of saved items. :)

------
mikece
Is cloning Google Reader really that hard? I use QuiteRSS but this article and
comments has me thinking an RSS aggregator in PHP and using SQLite that could
be installed (git cloned?) to __any __hosting provider would be an awesome
project.

Maybe I should write it. :-)

~~~
ScottFree
That's exactly what TheOldReader[0] did.

[https://theoldreader.com](https://theoldreader.com)

~~~
mikece
TheOldReader appears to be a semi-free SaaS; I was referring to something
that's an open source product that could be installed on any commodity hosting
provider -- git clone {path_to_repo_on_github} -- with the database/state of
the app being just a SQLite database which can be backed up or moved at will.
That's not at all what TheOldReader appears to be.

~~~
listenallyall
But you asked for a clone of Google Reader. Which theoldreader is. (bazqux.com
is better though)

~~~
mikece
I actually asked if cloning Google Reader was all that hard, not if it had
been done.

------
ABS
I'm one of those people still using version 3.3.2 and I've just exported from
it and imported into version 5 and.... it loses all the folders and subfolders
I've spent years polishing up.

All feeds are now at the same level and basically unusable :-(

~~~
shadowfacts
NetNewsWire is capable of importing OPML files with folders. Worked for me
when I imported from Feedly. If it doesn't work for you, I'd report a bug. I'm
sure having a migration path from old versions of NNW is something Brent cares
about.

[https://github.com/brentsimmons/NetNewsWire/issues/new](https://github.com/brentsimmons/NetNewsWire/issues/new)

~~~
ABS
thanks for pointing this out. If I change the export option from the default
to "with groups" I can import folders into v.5 but not subfolders as mentioned
by others below.

It's better than nothing for sure

------
mooreds
RSS is back!

Just added it to our corporate 11ty site using a plugin. So glad the open web
is on the upswing.

------
soapdog
does anyone know some software as nice as NNW for Windows 10? It is the kind
of thing I miss on my surface...

~~~
cpach
QuiteRSS is available for Windows, but it seems to me that Netnewswire has a
more sophisticated GUI.

[https://quiterss.org](https://quiterss.org)

~~~
soapdog
thanks for the link

------
aheilbut
I wish that there were more apps that focused on the problem of searching and
organizing archives and tracking ideas over time, rather than just another
interface to the latest posts.

~~~
andersonnnunes
I use RSS/Atom to email, so I just save an .eml and file/organize it on my
file system (with all my other files).

So I got three independent interfaces: one to configure the feeds, one to read
them and other to organize and search/recall. Each with different folder
structure optimized for the task at hand.

------
Fnoord
Is there a way to synchronize between Firefox (or another browser) and RSS
reader which links have been visited? If I use Firefox on every device, and I
use Firefox Sync, then the content of synced including tabs, history, and
which sites have been visited. These have a different color (e.g. when I visit
HN). How do other people work around this? By never using a browser? If that
works for you, then I suppose you use some way to synchronize your RSS
readers.

~~~
Fnoord
I've partly figured out the answer to my question.

You can self-host a backend such as Nextcloud News, TT-RSS, FreshRSS. Your
client then needs to sync two-way with such a backend.

Using Newsboat (a TUI RSS reader) as standard, I'd say the following backends
are applicable:

    
    
       urls-source (parameters: <source>; default value: "local")
           This configuration command sets the source where URLs shall be
           retrieved from. By default, this is ~/.newsboat/urls.
           Alternatively, you can set it to opml, which enables newsboat's
           OPML online subscription mode, to ttrss which enables newsboat's
           Tiny Tiny RSS support, to oldreader, which enables newsboat's The
           Old Reader support, to newsblur, which enables NewsBlur support, or
           feedhq for FeedHQ support, or ocnews for ownCloud News support, or
           inoreader for Inoreader support. Query feed specifications will be
           read from the local urls file regardless of this setting. (example:
           urls-source "oldreader")
    

For example, for NextCloud/OwnCloud (which I opted for, as I already run
NextCloud, and have no clue whatsoever which one I should be otherwise using)
you need to add urls-source "ocnews" in ~/.newsboat/config and furthermore
configure ocnews-url, ocnews-login, and ocnews-password.

NetNewsWire looks good (Vienna looks like macOS did 15 years ago). However, it
does not support nearly as many external synchronization as Newsboat does
(only Feedbin, which is commercial, while I can self-host and prefer an open
protocol).

As for an Android RSS reader, I haven't figured that out yet, but Nextcloud
News support a lot of sync clients [1]

[1]
[https://github.com/nextcloud/news#Bugs](https://github.com/nextcloud/news#Bugs)

------
wasdfff
This app is nearly perfect for me, but I cant stand the three pane layout on
every rss reader. It’s a mobile layout, not a desktop layout. Give me a single
line list view with completely customizable columns. Give me articles in
simple popup windows, like apple mail messages. If I could have those two
things this would be perfect for me and would replace inoreader.

------
tschellenbach
I worked on Winds for a few weeks:
[https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds) It
has quite a bit of a following amongst designers and developers.

RSS has a lot of quirks, I wonder if an open-source solution will ever become
truly mainstream in this space though.

------
WA
Any recommendations for a RSS reader for Mac and iOS that syncs, preferably
without a third party? Doesn’t have to be free.

~~~
matthewmcg
I’ve been using reeder and it’s just fine.

~~~
george_perez
Reeder doesn't sync without a third-party though.

------
unicornporn
I'd recommend self hosting FreshRSS[1]. It works on all my devices via the
browser and there's an open-source Android client on F-droid. Works with a
SQLite DB, so no migration issues. PHP, so also works on my cheap shared
hosting.

[1] [https://freshrss.org/](https://freshrss.org/)

~~~
mhd
I'm actually a bit sad that it seems there's no decent standard for just
syncing the read status and subscriptions, combined with some good native
clients (like NetNewsWire, which always was one of my prime examples of why
the OS X app space seemed so good in the '00s).

But hosting or paying for a common complete RSS service and accessing that
with a limited set of clients seems the only viable approach these days.

Although in the last few weeks, I've foregone centralized services and do it
all via NNW in the evening -- saves me from constantly checking feeds, too.

~~~
eisa01
I started out with NetNewsWire, but have in the past transitioned to Inoreader
- web apps work perfectly for RSS as you don't need to sync anything between
devices (EUR 20/year for ad-free version)

Now if only all services could retain RSS, there's a new CMS being used by
Norwegian press that don't support it - I'm actually considering cancelling
one subscription because I will miss a lot of the content :/

~~~
unicornporn
Mind me asking what CMS that is?

~~~
eisa01
[https://labradorcms.com](https://labradorcms.com)

The few sites I checked doesn't offer any feed at least

~~~
unicornporn
Thanks.

------
jamespo
I still miss Mr Reader for iPad, the best RSS reader I've used on any platform
- now sadly abandoned

------
justinator
Damn, needs Mojave. This ol' laptop has been having problems upgrading the OS.
Guess we'll try that, again.

That's a bummer for me, I find the last version of NNW to hold its caches for
forever, leading to several dozen gigs of images I have to delete every now
and again.

------
aladine
For me, I am stick with terminal-like interface.

Since I am using Emacs, elfeed
([https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed](https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed)) is my
best choice for RSS reader.

------
ralphc
Dumb question, but is RSS still that much of a thing? I remember it being big
10+ years ago. Then Google reader shut down and I haven't given it much
thought. Where would I find a good list of RSS feeds to try this out?

------
wdr1
A link to the github repository, in case anyone else was looking for it too:

[https://github.com/brentsimmons/NetNewsWire](https://github.com/brentsimmons/NetNewsWire)

------
webwanderings
In this day and age, how could people use desktop reader without syncing feeds
when they're on their phones? I don't get it.

NetNewsWire on Mac is pretty good looking and fast software. But it is useless
without its counterpart on iPhone.

When it comes to RSS feeds, it is an either/or scenario. You either have RSS
wherever and whenever you want (and it has to be synced up and up to date), or
you don't.

~~~
dictum
I agree that a multidevice, always-available solution is better for many
activities, especially for news, but the downside to this requirement is that
desktop apps become unimaginative, blown-up versions of the mobile apps.

I want more developers to create _unapologetically_ desktop apps —
unconstrained, customizable, with multiple and filterable views of content,
able to integrate and share data with other apps.

(Yes, these are not mutually-cancelling goals. You can have a good enough iOS
app and a more interesting Mac app. However, developer time is finite,
features beget bugs, and only a small fraction of users collaborate with an
open source project)

~~~
webwanderings
I agree. I only want my up-to-date data (which is feeds in this context) to be
available in a bare-minimum fashion on my mobile, when I'm away from my
desktop. The argument I make above is based on the fact that when it comes to
RSS, your data (feeds) is either in a read state, or it is un-read. It should
be up to the users to decide where and what he/she wants to read. The equal
unavailability of the data/feeds on multi-platform makes it very hard to
consume the feeds.

------
outadoc
This looks very good, I'm just waiting for Feedly compatibility.

------
captn3m0
Any suggestions for a Linux RSS reader that supports Feever?

------
leemailll
Do it support fever api?

~~~
gglanzani
Not yet unfortunately. There are issues open about this, but Feedly will
probably be the next sync service.

