NetNewsWire 2
As most people undoubtedly know by now, Brent Simmons took the wraps off the long-awaited public beta of NetNewsWire 2 a few days ago. I participated in the private beta process, and I can’t emphasize enough how impressed I am by his continuing responsiveness to the NNW user community long after most developers would have started filing feature requests under “yeah, right.” As someone who has had his share of experience with demanding users (through both PodWorks, Cocoal.icio.us, and my day job), I know how easy it can be to get jaded, but Brent seems to have a lot of patience and regard for his users, and that is why I think he will continue to be successful in an increasingly competitive Mac aggregator space.
As Brent mentions in another post about NNW and external weblog editors, my own Cocoal.icio.us app is on board as one of the first clients of NetNewsWire 2’s external editor interface. To set Cocoal.icio.us up as your weblog editor in NNW 2, simply open the Preferences window, select “Other” from the popup, and choose Cocoal.icio.us in the file browser. Then, whenever you select a feed item in NNW and hit the “Post to Weblog” button from the toolbar or select it from the contextual menu, Cocoal.icio.us will bring up its posting interface prepopulated with the item’s information (it even tries to populate tags based on item’s subject). I think it makes for a pretty slick workflow—so slick that I’ve even thought of implementing the protocol in reverse (so that you could send links from Cocoal.icio.us to Brent’s MarsEdit weblog editor or the other editors that support it).
What really intrigues me about the aggregator marketplace right now is how different each of the major Mac players is. NetNewsWire has become a highly flexible Swiss Army Knife of an application to please the most demanding users (I heard someone compare it to BBEdit, and I think that’s apt), Safari RSS uses a fairly minimalist “RSS as browser bookmarks” design, PulpFiction adopts an email-like interface, NewsFire takes its UI cues from iChat, and Shrook models itself on iTunes. Clearly we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what the best ways to do syndication are, and the next few years, as more and more neophytes discover syndication and weblogs, should be very interesting indeed.