Answers to frequently-asked-questions about NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone.

Rob J Wells: “Most of my heavy reading takes place in NetNewsWire, so I’ve coupled up Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet with the application.”

wurzelfoo: “In NetNewsWire, i had plug-ins disabled in news items, as it dramatically slowed down my feed-reading workflow. That, obviously, enforced me to open a browser-tab to view embedded videos. Not anymore, with ClickToFlash I have speed and convenience.”

Ken Clark: “I believe that if you only use these ten keyboard shortcuts, you will be blazing through your news feeds in record time.”

DIGTD: “The cool little feature is the ability to choose what feeds you show on the iPhone. Simply, swipe across the feed that you do not want to show on the iPhone and select delete. You now have the option to remove the feed for good, or to just remove it from the iPhone.”

Me, writing a guest post for the NewsGator Widget Blog: “NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.”

Nick Bradbury: “NewsGator has partnered with ReadBurner, and as a result, it’s now dead simple to share your NewsGator clippings with ReadBurner. This means that FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox and NewsGator Online customers can easily share their clipped articles with ReadBurner.”

Here’s how to share clippings in NetNewsWire. Once you have a clippings feed, you can go to ReadBurner and add it. (See Nick’s post for more details.)

MacTips: “One of the greatest things about the greatest RSS reader on the Mac, NetNewsWire, is how many things it can integrate with. It can go hand-in-hand with your blog, your Twitter account, your Del.icio.us account and many others because of its scriptability.”

David Chartier writes about using NewsGator’s subscribe-to-feed bookmarklet instead of having to launch NetNewsWire: “Major bonus points are awarded for the bookmarklet’s subscription process, as it allows feeds to be added directly to a folder.”

Me on inessential.com: “This should be the last of the things-you-may-not-know-about-NetNewsWire posts... This one’s just misc. stuff, in misc. order.”

zachholman.com: “NetNewsWire has an OPML export option, and I’m sure other readers do, too. I figured, hey, let’s just try to see if I can parse that export to see which of my subscribed feeds have WebClips.”

Me, writing on inessential.com about NetNewsWire, this time talking about the subscriptions list.

Me on inessential.com: “The space bar scrolls the current item. If there is no more to scroll, it goes to the next unread item. This way you can read all of your news with coffee cup in one hand, while the other taps the space bar.”

Disruptive Conversations: “What’s very cool is that if you select/highlight a block of text before clicking the button you get only that part brought across into MarsEdit. So if there is a paragraph you want to include in your post, simply highlight the paragraph, click the button and you’re off and blogging.”

Me on inessential.com: “The most common feature request in the feedback I read today is that NetNewsWire should play video, Flash, YouTube, etc. It does. It’s turned off by default, but it’s easy to turn on.”

Me on inessential.com: “If you use NewsGator syncing, you can share your clippings folders as feeds. In other words, you can make a clippings folder that other people can subscribe to.”

Ode to Apple: “Here, let me summarize various settings which have worked good for me so far. I urge you to try them, enhance them and change them to suit you best.”

Mac Tips, Miraz Jordan: “Would you like to easily follow any mentions of the iPod touch, or perhaps Lhasa Apso dogs, in the RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to? Or how about mentions of your favourite sports team, or a certain politician?”

Me on inessential.com: “One of my favorite features of NetNewsWire is how it works with a bunch of other desktop apps. The idea is this: news comes in to NetNewsWire, and then you route stuff to wherever it should go.”

Miraz Jordan writes about how, in NetNewsWire, “it’s easy to add photos from RSS feeds to iPhoto: Control click on the photo and choose Add Image to iPhoto Library from the contextual menu.”

One of my favorite parts of working on NetNewsWire is the connection to other apps: weblog editors such as MarsEdit and ecto, Apple apps like iPhoto, Address Book, and iCal, and apps like VoodooPad and Twitterrific, from my fellow Mac developers.

David Teare: “1Passwd version 2.1 was released today sporting a new logo, NetNewsWire support and a tonne of new features and improvements.”

nnutter.com describes how to edit your Subscriptions.plist file so that each subscription sorts its news items by date. (Note: definitely make a backup before trying anything like this!)

CASE Apps: “Apple ships a Remote Control with any new Mac. The pre-installed functionality is limited to control just a couple of applications. Sofa Control breaks this limit. With Sofa Control you are able to control any application on your Mac and trigger the actions you like.”

Sofa Control comes with built-in support for NetNewsWire—you can control NetNewsWire with your Apple Remote Control.

Code Sorcery Workshop: “Fire it up and within seconds you can easily post to one or more del.icio.us accounts. Drag a URL from any browser, open a URL shortcut file on the desktop, or drag a URL right onto the dock icon.”

It works with NetNewsWire—if you’re using a 2.1 beta, you can choose Pukka as your post-to-del.icio.us application.

On inessential.com I posted a list of things you may not know about NetNewsWire.

Code Sorcery Workshop: “We’re happy to announce that the latest NetNewsWire Beta has added support for a del.icio.us posting client in addition to a normal external blogging client. What’s more, Pukka is on the official list of supported del.icio.us clients!”

Mac OS X Hints describes how to set the minimum font size in NetNewsWire’s browser.

logan design: “nnw unread menu is a simple menu bar application which can provide you with a quick and easy way to see how many headlines are marked as unread in the popular rss reader netnewswire. not only can you view the total number of unread headlines right in the menu bar, but with one click, you can view which subscriptions are unread and how many articles are in each. nnw unread menu also provides growl notification for netnewswire, instantly notifying you when new headlines are available.”

Blogum: “A couple of days ago I posted code for an AppleScript application bundle which let you post entries from NetNewsWire to iWeb. But that code didn’t support NetNewsWire’s external weblog editor protocol, so it was a little fragile. Here’s a new disk image with updated code which does support the protocol.”

Ditchnet.org: “Cocoa Cookies is a very simple Cocoa app that helps you to search for and delete HTTP cookies stored in the shared Cocoa cookies storage used by Safari, NetNewsWire, Shiira, and others.”

43 Folders: “I actually had a folder called ‘Sequester’ where I’d throw any feed that was starting to get on my nerves (too many [kitty photos | jokey memes | posts about the salvation promised by Longhorn/Vista]).”

Tech Goes Boom: “For those of us who can’t sync our NetNewsWire data over the web due to firewalls or other infonazi roadblocks, there is hope. I currently keep the contents of ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire on my USB thumbdrive. It does slow things down a little bit, but nothing major, and it allows me to keep everything current.”

Peter Rukavina: My Delicious NetNewsWire: “This week I found out that my RSS newsreader, NetNewsWire works really well with my OS X del.icio.us front-end Cocoalicious. So I decided to make a screencast to show how I use them together.”

Feed Your Reader lets you subscribe to a site’s feed in your default aggregator, such as NetNewsWire, using Firefox’s live bookmark icon.

MacTips has posted tips for reading feeds in NetNewsWire, including use of the spacebar and enter key, organizing feeds into groups, flagging items, and more.

Daniel Miessler describes his system for efficiently reading news using an RSS aggregator and a browser with tabs, based on David Allen's Getting Things Done.

“When you’re opening a myriad of websites and checking each at different times, there’s never an end to it. With this system there is. You check your reliable feeds, open anything of interest, read them all in turn, then you’re done.”

On inessential.com we posted another list of NetNewsWire features you might not know about.

On inessential.com we listed a bunch of other new features (aside from tag subscriptions) in NetNewsWire 2.0 that you may not know about.

On inessential.com we wrote about tag subscriptions, a useful feature new in NetNewsWire 2.0 that you may not have run across yet. Tag subscriptions let you subscribe to feeds on a given topic from Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati.

dashLicious is a Dashboard widget that “implements a post to your del.icio.us account on the fabulous web service created by Joshua Schachter. dashLicious is optimised for Safari and NetNewsWire users. When you enter into the dashboard dashLicious will automatically populate the url and description fields from either Safari or NetNewsWire (and will allow you to toggle between the two inputs).”

If you’re viewing news items, and you want to open the right-most tab—the tab you most recently created—then type shift-cmd-leftArrow. Or choose Window > Select Previous Tab.

MacMinute: “URL Manager Pro allows users to store, manage, and organize bookmarks independently of their browser. Version 3.4.2 adds support for NetNewsWire, the RSS news reader.”

Scott Laird: “I spent a few minutes cleaning out the cookie jar, and—amazingly enough—Safari’s a lot faster. I haven’t seen the beachball of death since I cleaned up the cookies; before I was seeing it every minute or so.”

Update: To be clear, the reason for pointing to this article is that cleaning up your Safari cookies can help NetNewsWire performance. NetNewsWire uses WebKit (the Safari engine) under the hood, which means it shares cookies with Safari.

These handy shortcuts work in both the subscriptions outline and in the Sites Drawer:

, - collapse, or collapse-to-parent
. - expand
; - collapse all
' - expand all

Note that these keys are right next to each other and that on laptops they’re close to the arrow keys.

For more keyboard shortcuts like this, choose Help > Keyboard Shortcuts.

If you’re using NetNewsWire 2.0b37, and you used earlier betas, then you can delete the SearchIndex file.

It’s probably taking up a few megabytes of space on your hard drive. (Possibly quite a few megabytes.)

Here’s what to do:

1. Make a backup of your NetNewsWire prefs and data. (It’s always a good idea to make backups.) For more about making backups, open the Help book, click on “Contents,” then click on “Backing up your data.”

2. Delete the file at ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/SearchIndex

This file is no longer used (as of 2.0b37) so it’s safe to delete.

To put the cursor in the search field in the toolbar, type cmd-opt-F. (If the search field is visible in the toolbar.)

Then to move focus back to the headlines table, type the Tab key.

You can set keyboard shortcuts for scripts—and even change the builtin NetNewsWire shortcuts. Here’s what to do:

1. Open System Preferences.

2. Click the Keyboard & Mouse icon.

3. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.

4. Click the + button.

5. In the sheet that opens up, choose NetNewsWire from the Application popup menu. Type the name of the menu item in Menu Title, then type the shortcut you want in Keyboard Shortcut. Click the Add button.

6. Restart NetNewsWire for the change to take effect.

If you choose a news item from NetNewsWire’s dock menu, and hold down the option key, you will jump to NetNewsWire’s view of the news item rather than opening the page in the browser.

Robert Daeley: “I set up a simple shell script to ask Mail and NetNewsWire for their current unread counts, then I display it in a tiny GeekTool window.”

To find a particular subscription in the subscriptions list, here’s what to do:

1. Click anywhere in the subscriptions list.

2. Type cmd-F to bring up the Find panel.

3. Type part of the name of the subscription you want to find.

4. Hit return.

This will select the first matching subscription. (NetNewsWire will expand groups as needed.) Hit return again to go to the next matching subscription, if the first one wasn’t the one you were looking for. Continue until you find it.

The search is not case-sensitive, so “mac” will match “MaC” and so on.