The idea was to make NetNewsWire an app for all the various streams of new items. But I didnât foresee any stumbling blocks. While the API for sharing plugins was all the way worked-out, this API was only partly worked out at the time of the sale. If a developer wanted to add a way to read Twitter or Facebook, or anything else, that would have been do-able. (Work and personal, for instance.)Īnd it was likely that other types of accounts could exist. You might even have multiple Google Reader accounts. The idea is that you might have some synced feeds and some non-synced (âOn My Macâ), for whatever reason. It would have been a more structured source list than in previous versions.) (It would also have had separate sections for smart feeds and scripted feeds. Remember that this was 2011, and Google Reader was all most people thought of when they thought of RSS readers. Taking a cue from Mail, it would have had zero or more top-level âGoogle Reader (account name)â folders and one âOn My Macâ folder. I should describe the planned source list change. The app would have handled Google Reader and stand-alone feeds itself â but a developer would have been able to add additional types of accounts. And if you needed to do more, you could.) Account Type Plugins Enough was given to you for free that you didnât have to do much more than configuration plus an http call. I could ship a sharing plugin that wouldnât be included in the standard release, or ship one that could be included later. It also would have allowed me to ship plugins outside the normal release process. With the explosion of new places to send your content (Twitter, Pinboard, Pocket, and on and on) I realized it would be difficult to keep up and cover everything.Ī sharing plugin allowed you to create a user interface (if needed) and to send a URL and text wherever you wanted. And theyâd use protocols, so the plugins wouldnât have had to link to anything. They would all have had Objective-C APIs. I got pretty far along in defining some of the plugin types, to the extent that the app was using the plugin API under-the-hood.īelow are the types I was considering. This was especially true with themes â because theyâre fun to make and fun to try out.įor NetNewsWire 4.0 I wanted to take this to the next level and provide additional ways to extend the app. This meant more publicity for the app and it meant people could easily find these extensions that helped them get more out of the app. People liked to publish their scripts and themes. They were out of the way of the average user, and added a bunch of value for power users.Īlong the way I discovered that there was a marketing benefit too. Since NetNewsWire was a productivity-style RSS reader rather than a casual reader, it made sense to add these kinds of features. Not everybody used them, but the people who did use them really liked them.
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