Nerds of a certain age will have a warm place in their dorky hearts for NetNewsWire. First released in 2002, for years it was the best RSS newsreader on the Mac. At some point, a terrible version turned up on iOS, then withered and died. Now, original developer Brent Simmons is back in charge, and a new, free iOS version of NetNewsWire just launched for iPhone and iPad.
How do you read the news? If you do it on Twitter, you’ll be used to missing things as they fly past on your ever-updating timeline. If you read the news on Facebook, you’re being fed articles picked according to Facebook’s own agendas. And if you read the news on regular websites, you spend forever visiting sites just to see if there’s been an update.
If only there was a better way. If only you could open an app and see, at a glance, all the new stories from your favorite websites. Wouldn’t that be something?
The good news is, there are many apps, and many services, that exist to bring you the updates to your favorite sites. They work like Google Reader used to — only way better.
Lire is an RSS reader for iOS, and it just added a great update in the form of drag-and-drop. Now you can grab any news story and drag it either to Lire’s own drop-shelf (iPhone and iPad), or to another app (iPad). It really makes great use of iOS 11’s drag-and-drop, but is let down by other apps’ poor implementation for receiving dropped items.
NetNewsWire is the granddaddy of RSS readers, and v4.0 is now ready for you in beta form. It still doesn’t really sync, but it brings the arrow-based navigation from the previous incarnations of NNW that might make it the fastest news reader on your Mac.
