Estimating NetNewsWire for iOS Demand inessential.com

@brentsimmons Which also means that RSS is also alive and well, despite pundits’ repeated protestations of its demise and/or disuse 👍

@smokey This whole thing was set off by somebody saying on Twitter that they were one of the dozen people still using an RSS reader. They were going with that low “dozen” number for effect, obviously, but still it made me wonder how many people are using RSS readers.

@brentsimmons Yes, I imagine if there were “real” numbers for RSS, it would shock people. (And the NNW iOS Testflight numbers are mind-blowing!)

@brentsimmons Me! (My brother runs a tt-rss server that I also use.)

I don't use iOS though. (Mac for desktop and laptop, Android for phone.)

@brentsimmons I would not be surprised if the numbers on iOS exceed the Mac app numbers. NetNewsWire has a long history of excellence within the Apple ecosystem and a lot of built up name recognition which translates to street cred. I think a lot of people will give it a try if they hear about it.

@brentsimmons I use River5 and when I find something I want to read I send it to Radio3 to add it to an RSS feed that is monitored by IFTTT to add to Instapaper. Basically it’s my replacement for Radio Userland. I am nervous about being dependent on Dave to keep Radio3 running.

@brentsimmons Really interesting post, I've never been a mobile RSS reading sort, I've been using @Newsblur since reader shut-down and I'm just waiting for a desktop app to support their internal comments/blurblog system to stop using the web version

@Ron @Andyslvester Radio3 is not constructed as a server application, it is browser based and all this code is dependent on Fargo to which Dave never made a repo and thus there is no access to the source. It works as long as radio3.io and fargo.io remain online. While I could grab the HTML source for radio3.io I am not sure I could get the code off fargo.io, and at a minimum there is a lot of reverse engineering that I am not sure is worth the time.

@brentsimmons I’ve been happily paying for FeedWrangler since Reader shut down. (still rooting for NNW support for it)

@v Our goal is to support FeedWrangler and every other syncing system. It just takes time. :)

@brentsimmons I know. I’m willing to patiently wait. NNW was one of the reasons I switched to Mac originally (14+ years ago), and I look forward to picking it back up (when the time comes).

@brentsimmons Is there a way to just use iCloud - save the sync state?

@rom We’re investigating that as a possible future feature. The problem is that there’s a ton of sync state to save. :)

@frankm @Ron thanks for the vote of confidence, but I agree with Frank that the reverse engineering of Radio3 is not worth the time - better to find other apps to use. I am doing some experiments with trying to capture bookmarks for sites, see my blog for details.

@AndySylvester I am really using Radio3 to create a RSS feed. An equivalent approach for me would be to just open an article from my River and use the Instapaper bookmarklet to save it. The ideal would be to directly send an article from an RSS aggregator to Instapaper that would take the middle steps out.

@brentsimmons oh yeah - every feed’s status needs to be saved. Tsk tsk.

@rom Every article’s status needs to be saved, which ends up being a lot of statuses.

@brentsimmons yeah, figured that that is taxing.

@AndySylvester No problem. I think I still use Radio 3, but I probably get it from Dave. I thought I was getting from you, so I thought you might be able to help Frank. But it looks like all three of us are directly getting it from Dave, so we're all in the same boat!

@Ron @AndySylvester What might be worth doing is finding (or developing if need be) an open tool for creating & hosting a RSS or JSON feed. For me the purpose of such a tool is to simplify the process of curating items to be read later.