NetNewsWire and Feedbin

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

NetNewsWire is one of the classic RSS apps, debuting in 2002. I was pretty stoked when it went 5.0 and was open-sourced in August 2019! You can snag it right here. (Sorry, Mac only.)

It’s super nice, is fast, and looks great. It has just the right features.

But… I thought, at least at first, that really prefer websites for reading RSS content. I have multiple machines. I have mobile devices. I don’t want my RSS to be limited to my laptop, I want an online service.

NetNewsWire on my Mac

Well! I found out that NetNewsWire syncs with my favorite website for RSS: Feedbin. The syncing works flawlessly. Both unread items and all the organization. In fact, the UI for organizing feeds is so nice in NetNewsWire that I managed everything there and was pleasantly surprised how it all synced perfectly with Feedbin.

Feedbin on the web

I know a lot of people miss Google Reader, but I think we’ve arrived at an even better place after all these years. The UI for Google Reader was OK, but the main benefit was that it was the central place where everything synced together. That meant people could experiment by building readers and could use whatever they wanted. Feedbin clearly has APIs that can handle those types of things, so perhaps it could become that central hub service, which would be awesome.

I use Reeder on iOS, which also syncs with Feedbin. The central hub is real.

Reeder on iOS

I know a lot of people love Feedly too, which is also good. I just click with Feedbin better. I particularly like the Feedbin feature where it gives me an email address I can have newsletters sent to, letting me subscribe to a ton of them the same way I do with sites.