NetNewsWire 6.0d4 for Mac: First Test Build

NetNewsWire 6.0d4 for Mac is the first public test build of NetNewsWire 6.

You should probably skip it. It’s not a beta. It’s not even an alpha. It’s a d release — where d, which used to stand for development, now stands for dangerous.

We’re not being cute; this is not reverse psychology. We’re not fans of testing other people’s stuff and you shouldn’t be either. Especially not early stuff.

Things will almost surely go wrong, and, since we’re just a bunch of volunteers working during our spare time, we may not have time to help you.

Important: if you’re just running it because you’re curious, and then want to go back to NetNewsWire 5.1.3, you might have some trouble doing that, since this version turns on sandboxing, which changes the location of your data. It’s essential that you make a backup of ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/ before you launch this test build, so you can restore it if you go back to 5.1.3.

And let us satisfy your curiosity in advance: it’s just an app. It’s got some more features. You know the story, and you don’t need to run this if you’re just curious. Seriously.

All that said, if you’d like to help test, then: thank you! We appreciate your bravery and understanding.

Please post bug reports to GitHub. We can also talk about the app on the Slack group, in the #nnw-mac-feedback channel. (Both of these links are available in the Help menu.)

Changes since 5.1.3:

  • Big Sur app icon
  • Big Sur UI (when running on Big Sur)
  • App is now sandboxed
  • Syncing via iCloud
  • Syncing via BazQux, Inoreader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, and FreshRSS
  • Special support for Twitter and Reddit feeds
  • Share extension, so you can send URLs to NetNewsWire
  • Preference to change article text size
  • Preference to set preferred browser
  • External link, when available, shows in article view
  • High resolution icons in the sidebar (when available)

Download the app here. After downloading and launching, go to Preferences > Advanced, and turn on downloading Test Builds so that you get updates. (Otherwise you’ll be stuck on this version for a while and you’ll miss bug fixes. You will definitely want bug fixes.)

The app requires macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and newer.