NetNewsWire 2 for iPhone: not worth waiting for
September 24, 2009 at 10:30 PM by Dr. Drang
Last week, I bitched about the delay in getting the Google-synced update to NetNewsWire for the iPhone. Well, NNWiP arrived in the App Store a couple of days ago, and I’m going to bitch again. But this will be the last time; I’m through with NetNewsWire.
Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I’ve had a difficult relationship with NetNewsWire for years. Before getting my iPhone, I’d periodically try it out, wonder what all the fuss1 is about, and go back to Bloglines. But the iPhone changed things, mainly because the iPhonic Bloglines webapp was, initially, godawful. Even after the Bloglines people made improvements, I found NNWiP to be slightly better.
NNWiP 2 has undone the good feelings I had about NNWiP 1. It’s problems are legion:
- The Next Unread button never goes away, even if you have no unread feeds. This is a step backward from NNWiP 1 and makes absolutely no sense.
- The back button in the titlebar—which is how you work your way back from an individual article to the home screen—has disappeared 2—3 times, leaving me with no way to navigate other than to quit the program and hope that the problem is corrected on relaunch.
The next/previous article buttons in the titlebar have similarly disappeared.
- The titlebar has often displayed the wrong information. Once, the upper toolbar (or title bar, or whatever it’s called) got so confused it wouldn’t display anything—not the backarrow, not the title of the article, not the name of the feed, not the word Feeds, nothing. Again, the only solution was to quit and relaunch.
- Even when NNWiP was working, it’s display was weird. The linespacing was excessive, almost like doublespacing. I like a bit of breathing room in my typography, but this led to too much scrolling.
The little triangles in the home screen that are supposed to reveal the feeds inside folder (like the triangles in the Finder’s List View), have been stuck in the open position on two occasions. Not a terrible thing, I suppose, but only a relaunch would fix it.
This afternoon, NNWiP refused to launch at all. I’d get a white screen for a few seconds, then find myself back at the SpringBoard. This happened repeatedly until I deleted it and reinstalled from the App Store.
All this has happened in just 48 hours of use. Overall, the application looks and acts like a very early beta, not like a finished product. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was rushed out before it was ready because of the syncing mismatch between NNWiP 1 and the desktop NNW.
In any event, I’m back to Bloglines; I prefer it on the desktop and it’s plenty good enough on the iPhone. And I’m going to try to resist the temptation to try NetNewsWire again, no matter how good others say it is.
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NetNewsWire is one of those programs—like MarsEdit, Delicious Library, and VoodooPad—that always get rave reviews within the Mac community. ↩
