NetNewsWire and Bloglines
28 September 2004
The Bloglines folks have created a new feature that makes it so desktop applications such as NetNewsWire can work with Bloglines. (Bloglines is a popular web-based aggregator.)
We plan to support this in NetNewsWire 2.0. Here are some questions and answers on the subject:
What’s the benefit of this?
It means you can use Bloglines and NetNewsWire together. NetNewsWire will know what your Bloglines subscription list is and what items you have read.
Other applications—such as FeedDemon and Blogbot—do or will support it too, which means that you could use different newsreaders on different operating systems but still keep things in sync. (We expect that other newsreaders will support it also.)
It also allows NetNewsWire users to help reduce the bandwidth load on other servers: instead of going to a whole bunch of different servers, you can get feeds directly from Bloglines.
Will I have to use Bloglines if I use NetNewsWire?
No. It will be an option that you turn on if you want to.
If I use Bloglines, can I still have things like scripted subscriptions and smart lists?
Yes. You can use Bloglines with just some or all of your subscriptions—your choice. You can have subscriptions that Bloglines doesn’t know about, as many as you want, any kind you want.
Will there be other methods of syncing in NetNewsWire 2.0?
Yes. Syncing is still in progress for the 2.0 release—this is one method.
Are you also looking into other ways of reducing bandwidth use?
Yes. Definitely. There are lots of good ideas, and using one doesn’t mean we won’t also use others.
