I knew we wanted to ship NetNewsWire 5.0 for Mac with Feedbin syncing. (We also use the GitHub bug tracker and create milestones for different releases.)Ĭonsider the situation with syncing systems. We talk things over on our Slack group, in the #work channel: is that feature right for the app? Will it perform well enough? Does it depend on something else being done first? What’s the design for the feature? Does it need to go into 5.1, or 6.0, or…? Is it a Mac-only thing, or iOS-only, or is it for both? Etc. I said at the top that people can’t just show up and work on whatever and then we ship it.Įxcept, well - sometimes people actually do show up and work on what they want to work on, and then we ship it.
#Netnewswire login free
This may sound paradoxical, but it’s true: because NetNewsWire is free and open source, we have to have a higher bar of quality than commercial apps have. Even better: we hope that people can learn from it! I’d bet that the majority of for-pay Mac and iOS apps couldn’t survive this kind of scrutiny. Anyone can read it, and we don’t want to be embarrassed by it. You may remember older versions of NetNewsWire with fondness, and you may be missing some features the older versions had - but make no mistake: NetNewsWire 5 is a much higher-quality app than any older NetNewsWires.Īnd - this is smaller, but real - we publish the source code. (The Help book is a big part of that too! But we’d do the Help book regardless, because it’s a matter of respect for people who use the app.) We help people when they have questions, but it’s vitally important that we ship the highest quality app possible so that we don’t get bogged down doing support. This may seem surprising, but consider: we don’t have a support team. QualityĪ big one is app quality: we have to do way better than commercial apps. So there are some things we do differently from a commercial app. We definitely do not run the project as if it were a commercial appīut remember that NetNewsWire is free, has no budget (not one cent), and everyone who works on it is volunteering their time. It’s not a democracy, and it’s certainly not a thing where people just show up and ship whatever they feel like. My leadership style is to ask questions, talk things over, look for consensus, and trust people - but the last call is mine.
It is! But it’s also true that the app has my name on it. I’ve become fond of saying that NetNewsWire is a team. We even set dates internally - and then blow right through them. In most respects it’s indistinguishable from a commercial app. We have a help book, a website, a blog, a Twitter account. We plan features and fixes the same way we would if the app cost money. NetNewsWire is not willy-nilly like that. There’s a misconception about open source apps: people often think they’re not really intentionally run - they just kind of accrete whatever features and fixes that people who show up feel like doing. We run the project as if it were a commercial app People ask me, “So - I can just show up, see something I feel like doing, do it, and then it will just show in the app?”
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