In case you haven’t heard the news, Brent Simmons recently regained the rights to NetNewsWire, the groundbreaking Mac news reader, which also happens to be the progenitor of MarsEdit.

I have been a fan of NetNewsWire since before Brent sold it to NewsGator. Since before NewsGator sold MarsEdit to me. Before they sold NetNewsWire to Black Pixel. For a long time.

After Black Pixel took the reins, they put a lot of effort into a massive overhaul of the app, modernizing the look and feel and adding a robust, in-house syncing mechanism. When they released NetNewsWire 4 in 2015, it seemed as though the future for the app was bright.

As nice as NetNewsWire 4 was, it also differed a lot from NetNewsWire 3. They pared back the feature set a lot, in ways that made switching inconvenient to me. So I soldiered on with 3.3.2, thinking that I would update to 4.x eventually.

I never did. For whatever reason, work on NetNewsWire seemed to stall, and I never found the updated version of the app to fit my needs. NetNewsWire 3 worked just fine.

The meaning of “just fine” started to shift as macOS changed underneath the app. Subtle bugs emerged, the app’s lower-resolution graphics started to look fuzzy, and the networking infrastructure of the app is from an older era that is failing to connect to some SSL servers. In short, it’s no longer the great app that it once was. One particular bug with the size of the “Clippings” folder icon has been bugging me for years:

Over the years I considered other news readers such as Reeder (which is free for a limited time, by the way), but none of them scratched that NetNewsWire 3 itch. I rely upon some arcane features of the app including “scripted feeds,” which allow me for example to run Python scripts on my Mac that connect to Twitter and generate RSS feeds from search results. That’s not possible in most feed readers.

I used to fantasize about getting access to the NetNewsWire 3 source code and sprucing it up. I wondered how things might have turned out differently if, in addition to acquiring MarsEdit from NewsGator, I had acquired both? I can’t say I would have done a better job than Black Pixel, but I would have preserved the features I care about, and that Clippings folder icon would be the right size!

Because Brent and I are still close friends, we have been in conversation about NetNewsWire and the various options for moving it forward into the future. I’ve also been contributing to the NetNewsWire open source project, which is based on an entirely new code base unrelated to NetNewsWire 3.

Since I’m not the only stalwart NetNewsWire 3 user, one of the things Brent was curious about was whether he could give that version “one last hurrah,” so to speak. Fix a few of the most glaring bugs, build against a modern SDK, and not only create an artifact for history to more accurately judge the app’s virtues, but to give long-standing users something to tide them over while development continues on NetNewsWire 5.

I was honored when Brent handed me the keys to the castle, so to speak, by sending me a copy of NetNewsWire 3’s source code. To heavily paraphrase what he said, it was basically “let me know if it’s worth saving.”

I got the app building with Xcode 10 on macOS Mojave beta 9. There were some major glitches. The sidebar was pure black, fonts were rendering wrong. Probably whole subsets of functionality were not working, or working unreliably. I sent the source base back to him with a report that it builds and runs, but would probably take some work to get into shippable shape.

Brent made the pragmatic choice not to release an updated NetNewsWire 3. Putting the bugs aside, he recognized that any time invested in that old version is an investment in older technology that does not have a viable future. It’s a distraction from the New World NetNewsWire.

To be honest, the decision doesn’t sting at all. I’ve switched most of my news reading to development releases of NetNewsWire 5, and only use NetNewsWire 3 for a handful of those geeky script-based RSS feeds I am still relying on.

I was grateful to have the opportunity after all these years to take a peek at the source code to the app, and to get a feel for what it would take to salvage what’s left. I couldn’t resist fixing at least one bug before I passed it along though:

If you’re curious: the Clippings icon is obtained from the Mac operating system. At one point in history it must have come from the system at just the perfect size to fit the source list in the app, but as Apple modernized and adapted to higher resolution Macs, they must have updated the icon to support drawing at much larger sizes. NetNewsWire 3.3.2 doesn’t manually set the size to the expected 16x16pt size, but 3.3.3j (for Jalkut!) does.

Goodbye, NetNewsWire 3. You were a great app, but your time has passed. Long live NetNewsWire 5.