via: Musings – Designing the NetNewsWire 3.2 icon.

Neat post by Brad Ellis on the process he went through to design the icon for NetNewsWire 3.2.  Check it out.

NetNewsWire has been my primary tool for reading news and RSS feeds for awhile now.  That said, I never could figure out a good system to deal with streaming or high-volume news feeds given it is designed, as are most RSS readers, around an inbox paradigm.  I must have subscribed and unsubscribed to high-volume feeds like TechCrunch or Mashable a half dozen times, only to give up when I saw the unread counts steadily go to double, or even triple digits.

Help came though from an unexpected source – Twitter.  Once I actively started using Twitter, I realized it was a great tool for consuming streaming news whether it was CNN Breaking News, ESPN, or one of the aforementioned sources.  News stories flow through your Twitter stream, you skim the headlines, detect news patterns as appropriate, and click through as something

catches your eye.

No unread items guilt, no inboxes to get to zero.  A great system really.

That led me to move a lot of my favorite news feeds over to Twitter and so far it has worked out great.  That said, I still have a number of feeds that I house in NetNewsWire.  In the past, I have played with all sorts of models to organize my subscriptions from category-based to grouping them into daily, weekly, or must-read groups.

However, inspired by Twitter I recently made a big change.

I now have only three groups:  ”Must Read”, “River of News”, and “Admin”.  That’s it.  What do they mean?

• “Must Read” are the feeds I never want to miss – that is a carry over from organization ideas past.
• “Admin” contains feeds that monitor different sites or services I work with.
• “River of News” – this is the big change.  For those of you who follow Dave Winer, there is no secret about the name – it represents a model of streaming news as opposed to “inbox”-oriented news.

What I tried to do with this folder was create a “River of News” in NetNewsWire based on my experience digesting “streams” of news with Twitter.  So here’s how it works:

• I no longer read “feeds” underneath the “River of News” folder.  I just select the River of News parent folder and visually skim the whole stream.
• I moved the “Source” field in the news item listing to precede the title.  This might seem really minor, but it mimics Twitter’s lead of the username before the tweet.  I would have never done this before, but really like it.
• I then scan a whole page at a time and read articles as appropriate.  Given NetNewsWire’s great support for keyboard shortcuts, I can do this without ever using the mouse.

The ideal model would be for me to be able to expire the news stream after a given amount of time (or number of articles), but despite the 300+ unread articles you see in the screen shot above (!), I have had a good experience in the couple of days I have been playing around with this.

Recently, I embarked on what could best be described as a scouting combine for Mac-based newsreaders.  I downloaded and played around with all of the major Mac-based newsreader apps, and probably most of the niche or lesser-known ones as well in an effort to find the one that was best for me.

The result?  NetNewsWire now has a permanent position on my Dock.  While that might not be a huge surprise given it has been around for a couple years now and is the market share leader for Mac newsreader clients, I have been really happy with it so far and am hopeful this ends my cycle of searching for the perfect newsreader.  (I will save why I went Mac-based instead of web-based and more in-depth thoughts about the newsreader landscape for another post.)

With NetNewsWire, I am getting through my RSS feeds in record time, and one reason is its excellent support for keyboard shortcuts.  To quote Brent Simmons, the application’s author, “NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.”

I couldn’t agree more.  I recognize that other newsreader apps have great keyboard support as well,  but I have been impressed with how intuitive the NetNewsWire implementation has been.  I believe that if you only use these ten keyboard shortcuts, you will be blazing through your news feeds in record time:

1. Space – If you only know one shortcut, this is it.  Hitting space will either go to the next unread article or scroll an article ahead if scrolling is required.  Theoretically you could only use this shortcut and you could read every article in the newsreader.
2. Arrow keys

1. r – Marks item as read.
2. u – Marks item as unread.
3. k – Marks all items as read.  Why is this a great shortcut?  If you have a feed that has pumped out a dozen or so articles since you last checked it, all you have to do is visually scan the headlines, and then once you’ve gone through any articles you wanted to read, hit k to quickly mark all of the others as read.
4. Command W – Closes a tab.  This is a standard Mac shortcut, but the reason I put it on this list is because it comes in really useful when you use NetNewsWire’s integrated web browser to read articles.  If you go into the full web view of an article, you just hit this shortcut and you will get right back to the news interface.
5. Return – View full version of an article.  It has the same functionality as the right arrow described above, but is more intuitive.  I find that I use both.
6. Option – Command – S – Add to clippings.  I use Clippings as a temporary holding area for articles that I want to read later and/or add to Delicious when I have more time.
7. Shift – Command – R – Refresh all.  The fastest refresh time you can configure for NetNewsWire is to check for new articles every 30 minutes.  Therefore if you want to do a quick check to make sure you’ve got all the latest content, just hit this combo.
8. Control – Command – ‘ - Post to Delicious.  While not for everyone, if you use Delicious this is a great shortcut.  On a side note, NetNewsWire also supports direct posting to blogs and Twitterific in case you were wondering.
9. Shift – Command – R – Refresh all.  The fastest refresh time you can configure for NetNewsWire is to check for new articles every 30 minutes.  Therefore if you want to do a quick check to make sure you’ve got all the latest content, just hit this combo.
10. Control – Command – ‘ - Post to Delicious.  While not for everyone, if you use Delicious this is a great shortcut.  On a side note, NetNewsWire also supports direct posting to blogs and Twitterific in case you were wondering.

If these have you interested in learning more, you can get a more complete list of NetNewsWires’s keyboard shortcuts by going to Help>Keyboard Shortcuts in the application itself.