AppleInsider Staff
One week after Google revealed plans to shut down Google Reader, the developers behind popular RSS reader NetNewsWire announced that work on revamped iOS and OS X versions of the software is well underway, with the forthcoming rollouts said to add support for feed syncing.
In a post to its official blog, Black Pixel, the company that purchased NetNewsWire in 2011, said it has been working on new iterations of the app for at least a year, adding enhancements and new features to keep the venerable RSS reader "up with the times."
As noted by Cult of Mac, the look of NetNewsWire has not been updated in some time, possibly because Black Pixel was busy working on the powerful text, image and file comparison and merging tool Kaleidoscope 2 for Mac.
One of the primary concerns in retooling NetNewsWire was RSS feed syncing functionality, one of the standout features of the soon-to-be-deprecated Google Reader.
"It's too soon to go into details about this, but you should know that we recognize how extremely important it is and that it is a top priority for us," Black Pixel's Daniel Pasco said. "As far as sync is concerned, we knew we would likely need an alternative to Google Reader as early as last year. "
It remains unclear how the company plans to implement the functionality, but apparently integrating with Apple's iCloud and Core Data was too tall an order. The team spent "a considerable amount of time" on the effort, but could not resolve a number of unspecified issues pertaining to Apple's cloud computing service.
Black Pixel is keeping mum on when the new and improved NetNewsWire will ship, though interested users can download the current iPhone, iPad and OS X versions from the iOS and Mac App Stores.
Charles Martin
Wesley Hilliard
Stephen Silver
William Gallagher
Marko Zivkovic
Andrew Orr
13 Comments
Does anyone have any alternatives to NetNewsWire? I know this app is popular but I have felt it's lacking something I can't quite put my finger on.
Readster is the best app
I'm so friggin' sick of all of these "Alternatives to Google Reader" articles that miss the whole point of what Google Reader actually was, and what's needed to replace it.
Look, there are, and have been for a long time, a bazillion apps and websites for reading RSS feeds. Google Reader wasn't the first, and it won't be the last. This functionality of Google Reader won't be missed by many.
What will be missed, and what's desperately needed in its place is an RSS aggregator and manager that has an open API and allows item sharing along with an RSS feed of shared items.
Arguably, this service shouldn't even have any "reader apps" other than the website, and the website should be a bare minimum reader used really only in the service of management and sharing.
Does anyone have any alternatives to NetNewsWire? I know this app is popular but I have felt it's lacking something I can't quite put my finger on.
I switched from NetNewsWire to NewsFire back in the day, but haven't used any RSS reader for ages. Kind of had the impression it had been killed by Twitter.
I would like Black Pixel to try their hand at an IDE. It seems like, logically the platform vendor should provide the dev tools, but JetBrains AppCode proves that Xcode can be beaten. But even it could be improved upon a lot.
How is Twitter a substitute for RSS? i want new posts from sites i visit a lot delivered to me. Why would i all of a sudden want to wade through pictures of what people had for breakfast in order to find that content?