Possible Improvements to NetNewsWire?

Posted on Sep 8, 2003

After a couple of weeks of using NetNewsWire some things to improve usability occur to me:

Drag and Drop subscription

Subscription via the Services menu in Safari is nice, but it would be simpler to be able to drag and drop URLs from the location bar onto NetNewsWire. This should, of course, cause an attempt at RSS auto-discovery at the indicated URL.

Sorted site list

As the number of sites in the Subscriptions grows, improved management of the list would be useful. The current grouping is interesting, but feels difficult to manage on a large scale.

Last time I exported my subscriptions to OPML the grouping was lost, but perhaps this is a fault of the format rather than NetNewsWire.

More useful would be the ability to sort the Subscriptions pane according to the number of unread articles or the total number of articles. Perhaps if the pane contained a table view with a variety of possible columns (and the ability to sort by a column, obviously) this would be possible.

It may be that some of these are possible and I've just not discovered how. Apologies to Brent if that's the case.

Update

I posted the same stuff to the NetNewsWire list at Yahoo Groups. Follow the thread here.

Update 2

Turns out that you can drag URLs from (say) Safari into the Subscriptions pane, but not anywhere else. That's a little awkward for my normal layout, but good news!