NetNewsWire needs tags

Posted at August 5, 2005

I have been using NetNewsWire as my main RSS reader for some time now. It’s a brilliant app – I highly recommend it! It’s like a Ferrari: Fast, good looking and going where you want it to go.

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved. Being an avid Flickr and Del.icio.us user, I have fallen completely in love with tags. Tags are – in my opinion – the most clever concept that has been introduced on the net the last years. It gives you and me a fast and easy way to organize bit amounts of data.

You may have read my post about tagging, smart folders and getting things done here on brilliantdays.com. I use this technique a lot, and the excellent Tagbag! widget by Benedikt Terhechte helps me find my tagged documents, files and folders without setting up lots of smart folders “manually”.

netnewswire tags.png

Now it’s time for software developers to start adding tags inside their apps. And my first candidate is NetNewsWire. I would like to be able to add tags for each feed I subscribe to.

Examples

43folders gtd, gettingthingsdone, productivity, mac, osx
Adam Curry podcasting, technology, personal
Apple Hot News mac, software, apps, osx
Boingboing weird, security, blogging, future, gadgets, geek, hacks

See? These could have been my tags for four of the feeds I subscribe to. The tags could be entered in the infopane for each feed, somewhere here:

boinboing feed.png

Next would be to make smart lists to use my new tags. Smart lists in NetNewsWire works the same way as smart lists in iPhoto and iTunes. I could set up a smart list for the tags I’m most interested in, like “mac”:

Tag mac.png

Naturally, there’s no category called “tag” in NetNewsWire. For now.

If I could pick just one new feature for the next version of NetNewsWire, tags would be the one. I have added this wish on the Ranchero bugs/feature wish pages. If you know Sheila or Brent of Ranchero, feel free to send them to this post!

Update
Andrew comments (scroll down to see it): “Why tag a static thing like a feed?” I subscribe to lots of feeds, currently over 400. So I use the feature “smart lists” in NetNewsWire a lot. Whenever a feed contains “Final Cut Pro” or “FCP”, it goes to my FCP smart list.

But the word “Final Cut Pro” is not very general. If I set up a smart list with the word “mac”, I will get hundreds, if not thousands of hits. Let me check. Ok, it was 1 386 hits.

So I put all the “Mac” feeds inside a folder, the “Mac” folder. But some of the sites that posts Mac news/stories, also specialize in other subjects too. Like 43folders” that is about David Allen’s “Getting things done”, productivity, moleskine, Mac software, OS X etc.

If I could tag 43folders with these tags, I could make smart lists based on my tags. That way, 43 Folders would go both in the “mac” smart folder and the “gtd” folder.

So when I need to check what’s new on the subject of “Final Cut Pro”, i have to check two places:

  1. The smart list searching for the words “Final Cut Pro” and “FCP”
  2. The smart list searching for the tag “FCP”

The second one would give me the feeds that normally serve me news on Final Cut Pro, and also the post that don’t contain the word “Final Cut Pro” – but hopefully something that relates closely to Final Cut Pro – the reason why I tagged the feed “FCP” in the first place.

One example to illustrate the difference between 1 and 2:

If you subscribe to the RSS feed of the Phila FCP Users Group, it contains 12 posts at the moment. All of them are related to Final Cut Pro in different ways, but not all of them contain the word “Final Cut Pro” (or “FCP”).

Here are all the 12 posts:

philafcpug1.png

But my “FCP” smart list, searching for “Final Cut” and “FCP” only finds 5 of these:

philafcpug2.png

Now, this isn’t the best example, because I could have added a search for “Final Cut Pro” in the name of the source. When doing that, the “FCP” smart lists catches all 12 posts.

But with other feeds, like 43folders, that wouldn’t work.

If you have suggestions on how to solve this without extra features in NetNewsWire, use the comments under.

feature requests, ideas, mac, rss

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  • Andrew

    I don’t understand. This doesn’t make sense to me. A “feed” is a static thing. As long as you’re subscribed to it, its representation in NNW doesn’t change, although obviously the content changes. Your proposal seems to be an additional way of identifying feeds themselves, which seems unencessary: if you want a feed in a group, just put it there. Unless you subscribe to so many feeds that you can’t even manage *groups* of them, this seems excessive.

    But all this does is help you group feeds dynamically, not their contents. It’s really those contents–individual entries–that matter. In the classic example, Flickr lets me subscribe to a dynamic feed of photos based on a tag. I don’t really care where the photos originate, only that I get fed those smallest units of content.

    In NNW, It seems to me that what you’d want is a way to smart group specific *posts* that meet some sort of criteria. SInce posts don’t arrive in NNW tagged, it’s hard to see how you’d be able to apply tags to them in order to do the kind of filtering I think you want.

  • Andrew

    I don’t understand. This doesn’t make sense to me. A “feed” is a static thing. As long as you’re subscribed to it, its representation in NNW doesn’t change, although obviously the content changes. Your proposal seems to be an additional way of identifying feeds themselves, which seems unencessary: if you want a feed in a group, just put it there. Unless you subscribe to so many feeds that you can’t even manage *groups* of them, this seems excessive.

    But all this does is help you group feeds dynamically, not their contents. It’s really those contents–individual entries–that matter. In the classic example, Flickr lets me subscribe to a dynamic feed of photos based on a tag. I don’t really care where the photos originate, only that I get fed those smallest units of content.

    In NNW, It seems to me that what you’d want is a way to smart group specific *posts* that meet some sort of criteria. SInce posts don’t arrive in NNW tagged, it’s hard to see how you’d be able to apply tags to them in order to do the kind of filtering I think you want.

  • http://www.getsatisfaction.com Eric Suesz

    Hey, Andrew. I actually use tags quite a bit with Google Reader. I monitor a lot of activity on a forum-like Web site, and I like to be able to tag topics or replies (which I’m monitoring via RSS) so I can pull out analytic information later. Is that a use case that makes sense? I really don’t like Google Reader, and I really love NNW, but I really need this tagging capability because it helps me work quickly and efficiently.

    Oyvind: great post, BTW.

  • http://www.getsatisfaction.com Eric Suesz

    Hey, Andrew. I actually use tags quite a bit with Google Reader. I monitor a lot of activity on a forum-like Web site, and I like to be able to tag topics or replies (which I’m monitoring via RSS) so I can pull out analytic information later. Is that a use case that makes sense? I really don’t like Google Reader, and I really love NNW, but I really need this tagging capability because it helps me work quickly and efficiently.

    Oyvind: great post, BTW.

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