Now that NetNewsWire costs the same as Vienna (i.e. In my opinion, the two best RSS readers on the Mac are NetNewsWire and Vienna. As RSS feeds becomes more popular, so do the RSS readers that allow you to access the feeds. Venerable RSS reader NetNewsWire makes a triumphant return to iOS with a slick universal app that’s even better than it currently is on macOS.RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is becoming an ever more popular way to read online content quickly and without having to visit individual websites. While reading articles, options are conveniently placed in a toolbar across the bottom to leave an article unread, mark favorites with a star, switch to an uncluttered “reader” view, or share using any service installed on your iOS device including Instapaper, a feature still missing on the Mac version. Many options are available from the article list by holding your finger down until a contextual menu pops up, including handy shortcuts for copying feed or homepage URLs. Press and hold to reveal contextual menus with shortcuts for quickly copying, sharing, or marking articles as read. NNW 5 features a button at the top of the article list to filter out already read feeds, as well as a “mark all as read” option along the bottom, with a preference to confirm this action first should you want it. There’s even a shortcut for jumping to the next unread article by tapping the downward triangle on the bottom toolbar. With an article open, it’s easy to jump to the next by swiping left. Smart feeds help filter out some of the noise, but there’s currently no way to customize or add to the three available options. I’d love to be able to create our own custom smart feeds, for example. Such options definitely help cut down on the noise factor with a volume of busy feeds, but they don’t go quite far enough. Like macOS, NNW 5 for iOS comes with 16 popular local sources ready to read.Īlso in the source list are a trio of “smart feeds,” essentially automatic filters for reading feeds published on the current day, all unread, or articles marked as favorites. Although NetNewsWire 5 for Mac remains stubbornly limited to Feedbin and locally imported feeds, the mobile edition adds sync with my preferred service Feedly to the mix. Get in syncĪlthough there was little reason to sync RSS feeds with other devices prior to smartphones and tablets, it would be inconceivable to release an app without it today. On iPad, there’s additional support for multiple windows and-with the right accessory attached-nearly 30 keyboard shortcuts, which make the app feel more like the desktop version. On the iPad, there are nearly thirty keyboard shortcuts available to make the tablet version more like the Mac.ĭespite remaining faithful to the macOS aesthetic, NNW 5 takes full advantage of iOS, with excellent support for Siri Shortcuts and system-wide Dark Mode (a manual toggle switch for the latter would be welcome, however). If you like to tweak text size or font style, for example, this is not the news reader for you. (It’s a testament to Simmons’ coding prowess that not a single “hot fix” update has been necessary during the first month of availability.) One downside to being so nimble is there’s not much in the way of custom display options. Where competing apps frequently get bogged down with complexity and feature bloat, NetNewsWire 5 for iOS remains lean and most importantly, free of the pesky bugs which increasingly seem to infect modern apps. Nothing remarkable on the surface, especially when other RSS reader apps like Reeder and ReadKit do pretty much the same. On the tablet, for example, there’s a familiar three-panel layout, with sources on left, list of articles from a selected feed at center, with the remaining space reserved for reading the chosen article. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Simmons and his small team did a remarkable job porting the macOS edition to iPhone and iPad. The words “stable” and “fast” are frequently used to describe this free app, and the same applies here. Those who use NetNewsWire 5 for Mac to stay current with the news already know what to expect from the new iOS and iPadOS version.
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