NetNewsWire and me

The things we nerds do for the sake of our nerdom. I know you want to hear all the details, so don’t try to deny it. Here goes… NewsGator,† makers of my favourite feed reader NetNewsWire, is transitioning all of its non-enterprise products to Google Reader synchronisation services and closing their own synching service. So far it’s been a schemozzle for yours truly.

I care about this because after e-mail clients (Mail.app and Thunderbird), text editors (TextWrangler and Coda) and browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc.) my next most heavily used application is NetNewsWire. I like this product and I want to stick with it. It’s bloody excellent. I use it on two computers (home and work) and on an iPod touch—so the synchronisation feature is fundamental.

It was on Brent Simmons weblog that I first heard that a new version was in the works. Not long after, I received a rather pumped up message from NewsGator saying that exciting changes are coming ra ra ra and oh, by the way, synching is changing:

NetNewsWire for Mac – you may continue to use your current version (synchronization won’t be supported after August 31, 2009). However, we recommend that you download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account for synchronization. Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.

NetNewsWire for iPhone Customers – a mobile RSS Reader requires synchronization and a new version of NetNewsWire for iPhone that supports synchronization with Google Reader will be available soon. We will notify you when it is available so that you can download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account prior to August 31, 2009.

I don’t want to use Google Reader for synchronisation, but that’s another story. Let’s just say that I like this software enough that I’ll go with it for now. I’m tuned in and following along at home. The transition instructions told me to download the new version of NetNewsWire for my Mac:

Download the latest version of NetNewsWire.

That link takes you to a beta version. Okay, so it’s not ready yet but they want us to move everything over to Google Reader really soon so they can shut off synching. The iPhone version is not available yet either. Here’s the part where I digress and tell you that I’m a weird nerd who still uses Mac OS X 10.4 even though at that time all the cool kids were starting to count the sleeps until 10.6 was released.

This is relevant because I decided to follow NewsGator’s instructions anyway and installed the latest version of NetNewsWire. It doesn’t work on 10.4. Fortunately, when I downgraded again to my previous version (which I’m still using) all my data was there so I didn’t have to resort to restoring from backups or anything.

So now I’m thinking, hmmm—I will have to finally upgrade to 10.5. No big deal, I guess. I’ve been using it on my work machine and I love it. Then I had a brainwave and decided to check the prices of replacement hard drives for my Mac. [ed.—Excursus #2, for those who are counting.] These things are cheap as chips! You can jam a 300GB drive in there! (I have an 80GB drive currently.) Next, I ask my friends whether upgrading is something that anyone can do with sheer hutzpah alone, or whether you really need to be a technician. @berkleebassist was quick to tell me that the answer lies somewhere in between:

@adriancooke 36 screws to remove the top case. Takes me about 2 hours to do, & I’m a certified mac tech. Get a manual, & be careful!

Ahh… yeah. Well, maybe that’s not really me. I would freak out too much if I killed my computer. I did check out the procedure on iFixit and there was a reader comment in there somewhere about little hooks that you can’t even see in the high res photos and you can break things if you’re not careful and I was all not tonight Josephine after that.

Anyway, back to NetNewsWire… I eventually ordered a copy of Leopard, carefully installed it last night (i.e. using the John Gruber’s Murphy’s Law approach) and now I’m sitting down to figure out how many days I have left until my synching is switched off. So far I have seven related tabs open to try to get this straight:

The e-mail: “Action Required – NewsGator Consumer RSS Reader Product Changes”

NewsGator Product Transition Instructions

NewsGator FAQs

nnwbeta.com

Google Reader’s signed out page [ack!—sorry, hairball]

NewsGator Exporting Clipped and Tagged Articles

NewsGator Online (where I’m logged in, but clueless)

Of all of these number four is the most helpful:

Note: This is still a beta — it’s unfinished, and it has bugs and incomplete features. If you haven’t started using a beta yet, you don’t need to: you can wait until it’s finished. […]

(Note: we won’t turn off NewsGator syncing until NetNewsWire 3.2 and NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone are finished.)

Oh, and in the midst of all of this I got another message from NewsGator saying, “chill, the dates have been pushed back because we’re not quite ready just yet.” I don’t know what to do next, so I thought I’d tell the Internet. All of this for a feed reader! And people are saying that RSS is dead. Pish!

† Does anyone else think that NewsGator should have a small “g” just like Photoshop has a small “s”? Wow,you all do? Would you look at that.

Related posts:

On reinstalling OS X Leopard

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