Comments on: Subscription Management in NetNewsWire?

By: Alec Couros

Alec Couros — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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?

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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…

By: Brent Simmons

Brent Simmons — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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.)

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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)

By: Joshua

Joshua — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Nate Lowell

Nate Lowell — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Cluetrain wasn’t just noise.

People of the Earth, remember.

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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!