In the days of NetNewsWire Lite 1.0, in 2002, you had to roll your own preference-pane switcher. The look here was stolen from Xcode — or maybe it was still Project Builder? I’m not sure — but was my own code. (Pretty simple code, though.)

I don’t seem to have a screenshot of the General preferences, but I have Colors and Downloading.

I did a Colors pane because I knew that one way to have people love an app is to make it malleable — they can make it their own, they can spend some time with it, maybe feel a little bit of sense of ownership (at least over their own instance of it).

It’s not the only way for people to love an app! In fact, this kind of thing — too many preferences, too much fiddling — can really go against people falling in love with an app. But I think this was okay in 2002, when we had so many fewer apps and more time to play with each of them.

(A goal for NetNewsWire 5 is to have the least amount of preferences possible, and for people to love the app for other reasons.)

The Downloading preferences had a slider for how aggressively the app should download feeds. Broadband was still fairly rare, and this was important for some people. I didn’t make it up — NetNewsWire was certainly not the only app to have this kind of slider.

NetNewsWire 5 has no such slider. :)

Also note that it says “When downloading news…” — I was still avoiding the word “feed” for fear of scaring people.

I have no idea why I didn’t center the slider section. Probably just an oversight.