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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Mar
24
(2005)
Subscription Management in NetNewsWire?
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: netnewswire.
I might be missing something obvious, but it seems to be more difficult than necessary to organize subscriptions in NetNewsWire. I’ve got 377 feeds, and sometimes I need to go into my subscriptions list to find stuff, rather than just living in the “New Items” folder (where I do spend about 98% of my time in NNW).
One problem I’m having is that there doesn’t seem to be a “list all subscriptions” view. I can use Smart Lists to list blog posts, but I can’t seem to list all subscriptions anywhere.
Also, I can only put each subscription in one (and only one) folder. That can be a problem. Yes, I can make folder hierarchies, but what do I do with a subscription like Brian? His blog could go in any of the following folders, but they don’t fit into a hierarchy, so I have to choose…
- eLearning
- campus bloggers
- canadian bloggers
- northernvoice attendees
- friends
- careo users
- xserve owners
- new parents
So? Which one folder would he go into? Back when I was using Shrook, it had some really nice subscription management features. It was modeled more after iTunes than Mail. All subscriptions were in a “Library”, and I could manually drag them to folders, and I could make Smart Folders to automagically pull subscriptions and feeds together.
Which leaves me stuck. I’ve got some feeds that I want to update info for, but I have no idea where they are in my subscription folders. And I can’t search for subscriptions, only for blog entries. So, how do I append someone’s name to their blog subscription title, if I can’t find their subscription?
Shrook also has a nice UI innovation that is like a dynamic column view – the leftmost column shifts out of view to make more room for the content I’m trying to read.
If I spend 98% of my time in “New items”, why does the subscription folder hierarchy need to take up screen real estate, when what I really want to see is the entry list and post display pane?
Update: Yeah. I just installed the latest version of Shrook, and while I don’t plan to switch back, NNW could definitely be improved by the column view and “library” model of subscription management…
D’Arcy, I was reading halfway through your post … thinking Shrook the whole time … until you mentioned it yourself. I really like Shrook and moved from NNW for the very same reasons you mentioned – library model, and column view. So what’s keeping you from moving back?
Shrook was good, but never had anything close to the polish that NNW has. And Shrook acted up on me regularly, where NNW has been rock solid.
NNW has some features that I like better, most importantly the handling of enclosures (podcasts, etc…)
When I switched from NNW to Shrook, I lost all of my flagged items. Again, when I switched back to NNW. Don’t really want to lose them all again…
Hi D’Arcy,
We plan more subscription management features, definitely. Here’s what we added in 2.0:
1. Find command.
Click on the subscriptions list anywhere, type cmd-F, then type a string. (This also works in the Sites Drawer, headlines table, HTML description pane, and in web pages.)
2. Subscriptions sorting.
Under View > Subscriptions are options for organizing manually or sorting by unread count or by name.
3. Dinosaurs.
So you can easily find subscriptions that haven’t updated in a while.
4. Smart lists.
You can use smart lists as “clones” if you want — you could set up a smart list that displays the items from another feed.
(Note: until the next beta, I don’t recommend putting smart lists inside folders. There’s a crashing bug fix coming in the next beta.)
Brent, thanks for the reply!
I had assumed that cmd-F only worked in the post/entry list view! My bad! That works quite well. Thanks! I was using the Search field widget at the top right of the screen, and that was refusing to find feeds. I had just assumed that the two features (Find and Search) were actually the same thing. They’re not! Cool.
Smart lists are a good start for this, but they take more explicit preparation to add an entire feed to a smart list (”Where feed title is [title]” or “feed title is [title2]” – it would be nice if I could just drag subscriptions into multiple folders – that would support multiple simultaneous additions (I could subscribe to 10 new feeds on Anthropology, and drop them into the “Anthro” and “new feeds” folders without having to manually edit Smart List parameters)
You know, it rocks to see D’Arcy make a review of NNW, and have a rep of the product answer his concerns right on the same blog entry.
Cluetrain wasn’t just noise.
People of the Earth, remember.
For anyone who hasn’t read the Cluetrain Manifesto, first – read it.
http://www.cluetrain.com/
Second, it describes a change, where relationships (between individuals and companies, students and schools, etc…) are more valuable when viewed and participated in as conversations, rather than in a more passive broadcast/publish/receive model.
So, Brent responding to my post about his product shows that Ranchero is mindful of the relationship-as-conversation model. He’s not just publishing software, he’s participating with the community (the purchasers of NNW) to make it better. Rock on!