Okay, here's a serious question that will hopefully rank up a bit higher than that stupid $39.95 joke that didn't come out as well. Just give me a moment to remove my foot from my mouth ... *murfle* ... okay.

As surprised as I am to say this, I'm seeing some rather unique things done with RSS that aren't currently implemented in NetNewsWire. I'm curious as to your thoughts as to, specifically, some of the innovations that Zoe and Newsmonster are doing with RSS feeds.

Newsmonster, for example, incorporates, per Cory Doctorow, "a reputation economy (float articles interesting to your buddies to the top of your inbox), micropayments for distributed patronage (use reputation data to assess the worthiness of various 'blegging' efforts), and Semantic Web hooks for things like FOAFNet and calendar integration." It sort of ties in with Cory's concept of 'Whuffie.'

And obviously, the author of Zoe likes you, so I doubt he considers himself a competitor, but nevertheless his innovations with blurring the line between e-mail and newsfeeds are a bit interesting, and I'm curious as to your thoughts about that.

Do you see things like this being incorporated into future versions of NetNewsWire? Would you say your work so far has been primarily on UI and standards, or has NNW been a source of any innovation? If the answer to the latter is in the negative, do you have 'innovations' in mind?

There is no shortage of good ideas for new features. Some of those things have been done elsewhere already, though most haven't yet. Just about anything you can think of is something I'm already considering doing.

When you're working on software, you don't really use the word "innovation" when you're working. You think specifically of features and problems to solve and things to accomplish. Whether those things are innovations or not is pretty far from your mind. You're just trying to do the best job you can. (Or, at least, that's true for me.)

For instance, I think FOAF is pretty cool, and perhaps NetNewsWire will support it in some way in the future. The real trick isn't downloading and parsing FOAF info, it's the user interface. And with user interface the best innovation is often *no* innovation -- in other words, you take something new like RSS feeds and present them in a familiar way.

Sleeper application
MarioX19

Do you think there is any aspect of RSS, currently being under used, that holds great promise for Web applications and services?

Possibly just RSS itself. It's widely used for weblogs and news outlets, but less widely used for other things that change over time.

For instance, I'm planning to add RSS feeds for my bug tracking system. There will probably be a few people who subscribe, people who want to see when the bugs they've reported get fixed. The biggest user will probably be me -- I get email when someone reports a bug, but I'd rather the report showed up in NetNewsWire.

The main thing is just to remember that RSS can be about anything that changes. It doesn't have to be news. It doesn't even have to be intended for humans to read. I can imagine machines communication with each other via RSS.

Proper feeds?
milk

What are your thoughts on the proper way to make an RSS feed? Do you prefer a full article or just an excerpt? Within blogs, do you prefer including comments within the feeds, or leaving them out?

Personally, I prefer that the RSS feed contain whatever is on the home page rather than an excerpt. This way I don't have to switch to my browser to read the whole thing.

It also makes it more likely that I'll read what you wrote. If I have to switch to my browser, maybe I won't do it, because the excerpt wasn't intriguing enough. But if you give me the whole post, I'll probably read it.

I don't like it when comments are included in the feeds. I prefer that you use the comments element that's in RSS 2.0. (I think there's something similar in RSS 1.0.)

My hope -- my plan, really -- is to do something smart here in the future. The idea is that for each news headline there would be an RSS feed of comments. So if you wanted to read the comments for a given headline in NetNewsWire, you could, just by clicking a button or whatever. And perhaps you could even add a comment from within NetNewsWire.

This requires getting together with all the people who make weblog software and coming up with a spec and everything, but it's do-able. I think people would like it.

How to start programming in cocoa
LKM

I've noted that there are some cocoa tutorials on your site. I'm wondering how you started programming in cocoa and what your programming experience was before you took up cocoa.

how do you think people should learn cocoa? are there any good books out there? is reading through tutorials a better way? are there good web sites? should we simply study other people's code?

what's special about cocoa? I already noted that in objecitve c, there is neither a real garbage collector nor C-style memory management, but some kind of reference counting mechanism. are there other things that you need to keep an eye on if you start out in cocoa?

I started programming in Cocoa about a year ago. I started by reading Aaron Hillegass' excellent book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.

I started programming in general about 23 years ago, when my parents bought an Apple II Plus. I started with BASIC. Both my parents were programmers -- my Mom still is -- so we talked about programming at the dinner table.

More recently, I worked at UserLand Software, doing scripting and also working on the Frontier and Radio apps, including Carbonizing them to run on OS X.

The best way to learn Cocoa is to learn C first. You need to know C, you just do. But if you already know a scripting language then learning C shouldn't be too difficult. There are good books and on-line resources on C.

Once you know C pretty well, then I suggest picking up a book on Cocoa.

I recommend Aaron Hillegass' book. I also recommend Building Cocoa Applications by Simson Garfinkel and Michael K. Mahoney. There are probably other good Cocoa books, but those are the two I've read.

The various on-line tutorials are good, but I think having a book is essential. You still should read what's on-line, look at open source and sample code, etc. -- but a book will totally be worth the money.

What's special about Cocoa? Once you get the hang of it, you'll just be blown away by how much stuff comes "for free" and by how quickly you can get things done.

And it's an amazingly logical framework. Sometimes when I want to do something I haven't done before, I try to guess how it's done, and then I look it up -- and I'm often correct, even down to the names of the methods.

Yes, Cocoa uses a reference counting mechanism, and that's probably the biggest hang-up for most people -- but once you understand it you realize it's incredibly simple and consistent.

Another thing to watch out for with Cocoa -- if you're coming with C++ or Java or similar, your instinct is to do lots of sub-classing. But with Cocoa you don't sub-class nearly as often. Definitely pay attention to the concepts of delegates and categories.

Information Unity?
vipe

Brent, I thank you for creating a wonderful application. I used NetNewsWire for a solid month at one time but found myself going back to the browser. Afterall, each full story is to be read in the browser and sometimes feels like a hassle. Which makes me curious as to how and when (or if) you think things such as RSS readers will involve in regards to the browser. Will they ever become one product? Another thing I found interesting was that I spent alot more of my time reading information from RSS readers due to the central location. Do you think the excitment in your product (and in general), has anything do with that? At what point do us humans, as information sponges, have to limit what we take in?

I don't think RSS readers and browsers will become one thing.

Or: I think it's likely that RSS readers will include web browser features, and I don't think it's likely that browsers will include RSS readers. (Except as plugins, as with NewsMonster.)

It's not necessarily true that "each full story is to be read in the browser" if the RSS feed includes the full story, or if the news reader includes a web browser.

Once the Safari renderer is available, I plan to use it in NetNewsWire. My hope is that Apple will make it so that all applications which use the renderer will share bookmarks, link history, and so on. (I don't know: I have no inside information on this. But it seems like an Apple thing to do.)

There are other web applications -- Watson and Spring, for instance -- that could probably benefit from using the Safari renderer. Should those products be made a part of Safari? No. Should those products get to take advantage of the Safari renderer? Yes.

That's the future, I think -- more and more Web applications that are *not* browsers, but that include browser features as needed.

I'm not sure at what point we humans have to limit what we take in. I know that with an RSS reader I can keep track of more news than I can with just a web browser. But I think each person finds his or her preference, they read as much or as little as they want to. One person may have 20 subscriptions. Me, I have 147 subscriptions. Other people have even more.

Rendezvous support?
softkid

Is it possible to use rendezvous in order to discover RSS feeds?
Would it be hard to implement?

I've been doing research on Rendezvous, because I think it's cool and I really want do something cool with it in NetNewsWire.

I was imagining being at a MacWorld, opening Safari or NetNewsWire, and seeing a *huge* list of people's weblogs and RSS feeds. Maybe you could also see what other people are subscribed to. I would love this.

Hard to implement? Probably not. As with so many things, the hard part is figuring out the user interface.

Do you think the "big guys" are going to do it?
rootpoot

There are thousands of RSS feeds for small and tech-oriented sites, but we have yet to see feeds from big traditional news sites like the San Francisco Chronicle. I guess the reason is that they can't sell traditional ads in a feed, but Google has proven that text ads are pretty effective.

Do you think that RSS will ever become pedestrian enough that the big news sites will support it, or is it going to remain something for savvy users only?

Well, some big sites already have RSS feeds. The BBC, for instance -- but also Wired News, the Christian Science Monitor, CNET News.com, The Guardian, Motley Fool.

I think more and traditional sites like the Chronicle will offer feeds once they realize what's going on.

Of course, it's not like it's an overnight thing. It can take months between thinking about having RSS feeds and actually having them -- you have to have someone who thinks it's a good idea, who convinces other people, who convinces management and the editorial staff. And then you get marketing involved, and of course the developer team (who probably originated the idea), and the legal department, and who knows what all else. It takes time.

By the way -- you can sell ads-with-graphics in an RSS feed. Most RSS news readers support graphics. So that simple technical issue shouldn't be a barrier to anyone.

NewsMonster
LKM

What are your thoughts on NewsMonsters? How do you think a RSS reader has to behave? Is it okay to parse the RSS feeds and download stuff linked from them? Do you think RSS readers should obey robots.txt?

What features are okay for RSS readers, what are off limits?

I haven't tried NewsMonster yet, but I've read a little about it.

I don't like that it automatically pre-fetches articles linked to by RSS feeds. But... I could be okay with that as long as robots.txt is obeyed, since in this case the software is acting as a robot.

If developers of RSS readers aren't scrupulous about following standards and limiting bandwidth consumption as much as possible then there's going to be a meltdown. Remember PointCast.

It would be hard for me to make a list of what features are okay and what features aren't okay. I would just remind people that you want to please the people who use your software -- but you have an obligation to the people whose sites you're reading. With RSS readers there is a lot of overlap -- people who use RSS readers often have websites of their own.

So I continue to look for ways to make NetNewsWire more correct in its support of standards, especially where that has an impact on bandwidth use. I continue to search for ways to make NetNewsWire use even less bandwidth. (And of course I'm open to ideas.)

The Following Questions were added by MacSlash staff:

What obstacles remain in developing NNW?

Nothing specific. Every bug fix and new feature requires planning, coding, testing, same as ever. There's no particular huge obstacle on the horizon.

Which probably means there are several gigantic obstacles just on the other side of the horizon. I just don't know about them yet.

Have you had any interest from Apple HQ?

If, hypothetically speaking, I had expressions of interest from any one or several companies, maybe including Apple or maybe not, I probably couldn't say anything.

What else is coming down the pipe from Ranchero soon?

More updates to NetNewsWire. The focus right now is on fixing bugs in the weblog editor and adding some features. But then there are just plain *tons* more things to do in NetNewsWire.

What was your first Mac experience?

I actually didn't use a Mac until 1989. I was managing editor of the college newspaper and we used an Mac IIcx (something like that) with Quark XPress and a laser printer to edit and layout the paper. It was a great experience. I fell in love with Macs right then.

Previously I had used only Apple II machines, no Macs, even though they'd been out for a few years. My excuse is that I was a teenager and had things besides computers on my mind.