Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year:

  • Adopted Swift structured concurrency and async/await
  • Adopted Liquid Glass UI while still supporting recent OSes
  • Ported our XML, HTML, and date parsers from Objective-C to Swift
  • Fixed a ton of bugs, including crashing bugs
  • Reduced battery use, memory use, hang rate, scroll hitch rate, and disk writes
  • Did a bunch of performance enhancements, including (especially) finding places where the app could just do less work
  • Did a bunch of hygiene things — got GitHub CI running again, started using SwiftLint, turned on treat-warnings-as-errors, started work on localizability, switched to Logger, added tests
  • Simplified and refactored code, deleted code, renamed things, etc. — gained clarity in a bunch of places
  • Added support for Cache-Control headers for feeds, so publishers can tune how often NetNewsWire checks their feeds
  • Optimized iCloud syncing (still more to do on that one)
  • Dealt with deprecations (switched to NWPathMonitor, for instance)
  • Added diagnostics and error reporting to the UI — iCloud Storage Stats and the Error Log are shipping, and more like these are currently in beta: Dinosaurs, Current Activity, Activity Log, and Account Stats.

Source: inessential: NetNewsWire Status

Except for Google Reader adventure (which was an utter delight), I’ve been using NetNewsWire since 2006. It is one of the first applications I downloaded after getting my first Mac and continues to be one of the first applications I install on a Mac.

That’s 20 years of reading RSS feeds made possible by this one application. 20 years of being delighted by writing, 20 years of knowledge gained.

And yet, the pace of development and improvements in 6.0 is staggering.

Thank you Brent Simmons; thank you NetNewsWire.