NetNewsWire is one of my favourite applications on the Mac. Yesterday Brent Simmons, the developer of NetNewsWire, sold his program to NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
There are two press releases on the site of NewsGator, an ordinary one and a much better one.
I like this! Congratulations to Brent and his wife. Very good for them. And good for us. Many use both Macs, PCs and mobile devices. Now we can get a solution that keeps track of new articles across platforms. My subscriptions and read/unread articles will be the same when I read them on the Mac, the PC, the PDA or the net.
“Brent: Here’s what we have planned. Existing NetNewsWire full-version customers will get a free 2-year premium subscription to NewsGator Online. This subscription will include access to NewsGator’s online platform, including synchronization with NetNewsWire and other premium features. This will also include all updates to NetNewsWire for two years. All this will be available as of the next release of NetNewsWire.”
I think is part of a trend, on which there are quite a few examples lateley:
Flickr. When Flickr went from beta, all “early adaptors” (people who paid for the pro subscription), got an extra year for free, and also go two extra accounts to give away to friends.
ComicLife. Creators of ComicLife, Plasq, gave away lifetime licences and an extra family licence to people who paid for the software the first months it was on the market.
It’s a good trend, and one that makes both developers and end users winners: If people pay for stuff, they often get extra rewards for it. Which makes it much more fun to pay. The developers get their money, people are happy AND there’s a lot of buzz on blogs and websites when things like that happen (which of course this post is a proof of).
I look forward to keep using NetNewsWire, and the only bad thing about this is if the .mac synchronization in the app is taken away:
“Q: Will NetNewsWire still include the synchronization – .Mac, FTP, Bloglines – that it currently has?
Brent: The focus will be on NewsGator synchronization, because that’s how we can provide the best syncing. It will work across multiple devices and platforms — even including a web version. The existing syncing implementations will get bug fixes, but rather than scatter our energy across different types of syncing, we’ll concentrate on syncing via the NewsGator Online platform. ”
But hey, with the new Backup 3 from Apple, I’ll whip up my own sync…