NetNewsWire Planning

We just released NetNewsWire 5.0.4 for Mac — it’s a bug-fix release with a nice performance enhancement when fetching articles.

But the question on your mind probably isn’t “When are you going to make NetNewsWire even faster?” — it’s probably “When is Feedly sync coming?” or “When is iCloud sync coming?”

Here are our current plans:

NetNewsWire 5.1 for Mac

This release will include Feedly syncing. It will have feature parity with NetNewsWire for iOS, including a reader view and a few other features that haven’t made it to the Mac version yet.

We can’t give you an ETA, but we can say that it’s next. We’re working on this release. Once test versions are available, we’ll post a note on this blog.

(This release will require Catalina. It will run on Big Sur, but won’t be updated for Big Sur.)

NetNewsWire 6.0

This Mac and iOS release will include iCloud syncing, user interface updates for Big Sur, and a bunch of other new features (including, hopefully, support for other additional syncing systems).

(Our current plans have us supporting Catalina and Big Sur in this release, but we’re not 100% sure about Catalina support yet.)

NetNewsWire 6.1

More… things?

Don’t know. Good stuff!

(There’s a good chance there will also be 6.2, 6.3, etc.)

NetNewsWire 7.0

This will be the SwiftUI release, where the user interface code will be shared across Mac and iOS versions of NetNewsWire. We’re hoping to be able to do this after the SwiftUI updates coming in WWDC 2021.

We could almost do this now, but there would be too many regressions. We’ve done a ton of work on this, but we’ll just hold on to it for a year.

This isn’t meant to criticize SwiftUI or to say that it’s not useful yet. It’s awesome, and many apps could be written using SwiftUI right now. But NetNewsWire has some special considerations. We’ll write more about what we’re missing in a future blog post. Our view — that SwiftUI and Combine are the future of Mac and iOS development — is unchanged.

(This release will require the Mac and iOS OSes presumably coming in 2021.)