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.
My gripe with vienna is that there is no way to hide the reading pane. You can have a nice list view but that reading pane always inches up from the bottom somehow.
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).
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.
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?)
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.
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.
> 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.
Could you explain what you're thinking of? Because I went to check it out and it looks like an aggregator service with a desktop client (which I don't have a use for) and some basic services like search & offline reader integration & a builtin offline reader?
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).
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.
So I got in touch with the owner of 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!
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.
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.
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.
A native application like QuiteRSS, completely self contained, just works, fast, low attack surfaces, etc is infinitely better than any web based monster.
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 :-(
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.
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.
Yep. You end up with no nested folders and renaming folders like "Tech - Blogs". This loses a lot of choices of how to read your feeds.
It also has no sorting and adopts the iOS style lack of information with a single text entry for each item instead of sortable columns. It is really best to treat it as a new program not a sequel much like what happened to Final Cut Pro.
You cannot keep using the paid version because it stopped working for some feeds.
I see no way to nested folders in 5.0. So if you have a Technology folder with sub folders like Blog and News, it won't import properly nor can you recreate the folder hierarchy.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
I'm writing my own personal RSS aggregator, and one of the things I did for it was writing a spec for a service-agnostic API for RSS aggregators with the goal of being the bare minimum necessary to sync feeds and items: https://github.com/shadowfacts/fervor
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
