NetNewsWire, which was relaunched on Mac last August, is now available on iOS and iPadOS. Like its Mac counterpart, the iOS and iPadOS version is built on a basis of fast synchronization and of sensitive and bug-free design. As with any 1.0 application, I hope to see additional features and improvements in future versions. Unlike most versions 1.0, however, you won’t find many faults and bugs. NetNewsWire is ready to be your main RSS client today.
One of the strengths of NetNewsWire is that if you have used the Mac application, the iOS and iPadOS version is immediately familiar to you, while making you feel at home on iPhone or iPad. I wish I could say the same for most apps, but I can’t. Whether it’s an iOS or iPadOS application moving to the Mac or the other way around, the basic experience of an application is too often reproduced without taking into account the unique qualities of the platform to which it is added.
This is not the case with NetNewsWire. The application benefits from the same attention to detail as the Mac application, but adapted to the iOS / iPadOS environment.
For users, this means several things. Like the Mac app, NetNewsWire is fast and reliable. I follow hundreds of feeds and NetNewsWire loads new articles as quickly and often faster than any other RSS client I have used. The application is also rock solid. If you’ve followed the NetNewsWire development team, you know they tirelessly crushed bugs for weeks before launch and signings. All software has bugs, but good luck finding one in NetNewsWire.
The reliability of NewNewWire is remarkable because it differs from the classic 1.0 versions, but it is not sufficient. It is this reliability, combined with the platform-specific features and interactions of NetNewsWire, that really makes the difference.
The NetNewsWire user interface follows a three column approach that works well for RSS readers. On the iPad, you will find the sources on the left, a list of articles in the middle and articles on the right. The article list can be expanded to hide the source list, providing more space for the article pane. On the iPhone, each column is a separate view that you tap or swipe, moving back and forth in the source list, article list, and article views. In addition to this traditional navigation, NetNewsWire provides dedicated buttons in the article list toolbar and article views to move to the next unread item.
The list of NetNewsWire sources includes sections for Smart Feeds, On my iPhone or iPad, and the feeds and folders of all the RSS services you use. Each section can be collapsed or expanded using the display triangles next to the section or folder.
As the name suggests, smart feeds are collections of articles that are automatically generated from the feeds you follow and include Today, All Unread, and Favorites. Today, my favorite of the three is Today, which is a great way to keep up with the latest news when I’m falling behind. All unread is a convenient way to see everything new without browsing through individual sources and filtering to display only unread items. Finally, Starred is a list of all the items you have marked with a star, which many people use as a bookmark system for things they want to come back to later.
I really like smart streams and would like to see them expanded in the future. Applications like Fiery Feeds and read have implemented similar features, which can also create lists based on how often feeds are published, for example. Ideally, however, I would like the smart feeds to be customizable by the user based on a wide variety of criteria such as frequency of publication, date of publication, author, publication, etc. Also, as much as I personally like NetNewsWire’s Smart Feeds, I think there should be a setting to hide some or all of them to help users who want to streamline their list of sources.
Each entry in the column of the article list includes a blue dot if the article is not read, the favicon of the source website, the title of the story, the date or time of publication, and according to the number of lines you have allocated to each entry, an extract from the beginning of the article. The column can be filtered to display all articles or only unread articles with a button at the top of the column. There is also a Mark All As Read button at the bottom of the column that can be set to display a confirmation alert. On the iPhone or when the iPad is in shared mode, this column also includes a button to take you to the next unread article.
The list of articles subtly changes when you view a list of stories from a single publication. The favicon moves to the top of the column, providing additional space for the title of each piece. That means fewer titles are truncated, which I like.
Additionally, you can tap the publication name at the top of the article list for feed-specific settings that allow you to enable notifications for that publication and force the feed to always be displayed in Reader View, the main advantage of that displays full articles from feeds that display only part of a story. Publication-level notifications are only local, however, so settings are not synchronized, nor are notifications displayed on any of your other devices.
By pulling down on the list of articles, you see a search box with two options that appear when you access it: “Here”, which means the folder or publication you are currently viewing, and “All articles Who searches for everything. Search is a fairly standard feature in RSS clients, but the ability to quickly switch between searching for articles you are currently viewing and all without accessing an “all feeds” view is a great touch. NetNewsWire doesn’t have thumbnail previews of an article’s hero image in the article list like some other RSS readers, but it’s not something I miss.
The last column is the article view. From the top of the column, you can navigate from one story to another and vice versa, whether marked as read or not. Below each article is a toolbar with a navigation button that scrolls the list of articles from one unread story to the next. From the same toolbar, you can also mark articles as unread, highlight them, turn Reader view on or off, and share a story using the sharing sheet.
So far, the features I’ve covered are largely the same as those offered by NetNewsWire on the Mac. It does all of these things well and reliably, but the app also includes many operating system-specific features that make it fun to use on iPhone and iPad, including dark mode, Split View, context menus , keyboard shortcuts, and support for shortcuts.
As a person who mainly uses dark mode, I appreciate that NetNewsWire follows my system settings. However, some users prefer dark mode for things like reading apps only, so a manual override setting would be a nice addition to the app.
During my tests, Split View worked perfectly on my tiny iPad mini and on my 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The only user interface issue I noticed is that in the split view, except the smallest, the button to go to the next unread article appears under the columns of the article list and the view of articles, which is not necessary. It’s a small thing and the buttons work as expected, but the button should probably only be found in the article view toolbar, as it does when the app is in full screen mode.
It’s great to see NetNewsWire adopting native context menus on iPhone and iPad. For individual stories, there are options to mark it as read, add a star, mark everything above or below the current story as read, mark everything in the current stream as read, open the article in the browser and share the article. For folders, there are options to rename or delete the folder. Feeds include options to get information about the feed, open its home page, copy the feed URL, mark everything in the feed as read, rename and delete it. Finally, for sources, the context menu can open the service parameters, mark everything as read or deactivate it. It’s a lot of options that make flow management easier than exploring parameter layers, which I appreciate. The only thing I would like to see added to the context menus that NetNewsWire does not currently support are rich previews when you long press the title of an article.
Support for keyboard shortcuts by NetNewsWire is just as extensive as support for the context menu. The app has 29 separate keyboard shortcuts that cover all common actions for navigating and managing your feeds. As a person who uses my iPad with a keyboard connected most of the time, I really like the thoughtfulness and care that went into this list of shortcuts. Not only is it expanded, but it also uses one-touch shortcuts that don’t require any modifier, as well as the arrow keys, space bar, and back. While many iPad apps support keyboard shortcuts, few developers have gone to great lengths to provide a full complement of the functionality of their app via the keyboard.
NetNewsWire also supports shortcuts. You’ll find NetNewsWire in the Applications section of the shortcut action directory, where actions exist to add a feed and view folders, smart feeds, and individual posts that you’ve recently opened.
The Add Feed action accepts feed URLs and has a setting to add it to My iPhone or iPad, Feedbin or Feedly, depending on the services you have enabled in NetNewsWire. It’s a great addition that eliminates the need to use a separate utility like Feed Hawk to add RSS feeds.
Actions to display specific folders and feeds are also useful, but I would like to see NetNewsWire expand its support for shortcuts. The best-performing app with shortcuts so far is Fiery Feeds, but even has room to expand its support. Ideally, I would like to see a display action with options to choose the stream or folder displayed, the period of the items retrieved and whether they are read or unread. I would also like to be able to mark articles as read or unread or add stars with the same type of parameters. Also, an option to search my feeds via a shortcut would be fantastic. By combining several actions and a rich set of parameters, NetNewsWire would not have to extend its Smart Feeds, as I suggested above. Instead, users could create their own with shortcuts.
NetNewsWire even supports multi-windowing on the iPad. I don’t expect to go through two streams very often at once, but I appreciate flexibility. Multi-windowing is the type of functionality that encourages experimentation with new workflows that will make the application useful to a wider audience.
About the only iPadOS-specific feature that NetNewsWire does not support and that I would like to see added is drag and drop. The best implementation of this I have seen is Read, which generates a rich link preview in applications that support it, such as Notes, and a simple URL in applications that don’t. The share sheet is a decent alternative, but sometimes it’s easier to grab an item and drop it into an app that you already have on the screen rather than tapping the share button and the user interface. an extension.
There are also two shortcomings in the iOS and iPadOS version of NetNewsWire that it shares with the Mac app. The first is the small number of synchronization services it supports. Feedbin and Feedly are supported, both of which are popular choices, but there are many other feed services available to users who, I hope, are on the roadmap for future updates.
Second, I wish I had more control over the reading experience. It’s not that I don’t like the design of NetNewsWire, but I do spend a lot of time in my RSS reader on devices of all sizes. I like to change things like text size, line spacing, margins and font to suit each device and my personal taste. NetNewsWire supports dynamic type, but there is more that I would like to change, and I would like to be able to adjust the size of the type regardless of my system settings.
NetNewsWire has come a long way in the six months since the Mac version was released. I didn’t expect to see an iOS version come out as quickly after the Mac app, but I’m glad it was. The availability of applications synchronized on several platforms is more and more important for the users, because their computing extends beyond a single device. With its expansion to iOS and iPadOS, I expect NetNewsWire, which has already seen a significant number of downloads on the Mac and during the iOS beta, will take off. It’s not only that there are a lot of iPhone and iPad users, it’s that being on three platforms makes each one intrinsically more useful for users. As a result, I expect the Mac version of the app to also see a bump.
I hope I’m right, because having another high quality option for reading RSS feeds pushes all apps in the category to keep improving and trying new things. It’s great for users and RSS.
If the lack of an iOS and iPadOS version of NetNewsWire has prevented you from trying it in the past, I encourage you to try it. There’s really nothing to lose, as the app is free to download from the App Store, and the Mac version, which I reviewed last August, is available directly from the Ranchero Software website.
