"Tabbed browsing has a role here as well."

You said the magic words!

Since most RSS feeds are delivered by HTTP, I think the http:// protocol handler should stay the same. Isn't this exactly what MIME types are for? Registering NetNewsWire for application/rss and application/rdf (or whatever the appropriate MIME types are) should result in the desired behavior, if it doesn't already.

Your trackback counter is broken :-)

I love it! If both pieces were combined, life would get easier to do what we all like to be doing.

Again, i'd refer you to Jason Kottke's writing on this very issue:

http://www.kottke.org/03/01/030108why_are_safa.html

and

http://www.kottke.org/03/01/030120sherfari_rev.html

Jake Walker

Uh, Kottke's post is not related as far as I'm concerned. And merging Safari and Sherlock would be... bad. See: http://daringfireball.net/2003/01/nottke.html .

Oh, and the TrackBack thing seems to be working now. It's just mildly delayed. Or chalk it up to a Safari "refresh, but not really" bug.

Dave

Awesome. I've started suggesting to the organisation that I work for that they use RSS as a way to communicate info to Partners, and I'm sure it will be handy for clients at some stage.

Integrating an RSS client into a browser (Safari) would be fantastic. I'd love it, but I also think it would go far to promoting the use into other streams.

RSS functionality in Safari would be brilliant, but what would it offer over NetNewsWire with WebCore built-in? For that matter actually, it seems like RSS would be better suited to Sherlock. But NetNewsWire is a great product; is this another market that Apple wants to take away from a capable developer?

Kottke's comments are totally related. He talks about adding RSS feeds, and NetNewsWire Lite and Sherlock type applications into the browser ... the uber browser that David's talking about, perhaps. I think it's absolutely related, and relevant.

I think that the two applications work much better seperately than in an über-application, particularly with tabs as part of the mix.

I have several hundred RSS feeds in my NetNewsWire subscriptions, and find that unlike web pages, which are by their linked nature not always read in a linear way, when using an aggregator I tend to read items in one sitting, opening the ones that interest me in new tabs in the background. I appreciate that both Chimera and NNW are both fast AND do their job well, and I think the überApp may not make me as happy as separate things that work well together.

As an example of the way I use the two together, I had a 2 hour flight this afternoon. Before I left my hotel, I fired up NNW and scanned through about 300 unread entries. I was moving fast and as I came across an item that interested me, I hit enter to open it in a background tab and kept scrolling. When finished, I had about 45 tabs open in my browser. I put my TiBook to sleep and when I opened it up on the plane, I had 45 different things to read on the flight. Some tabs had further links I wanted to investigate. I left those tabs open to peruse when I was wired again. Others I was able to close because I was finished reading them. When I got home this evening I had 7 tabs open, and was able to find the links in those articles that allowed me to find new and interesting information

I want to scan quickly through feeds with my aggregator to pick the ones I want to browse.I want to use the spaceboard to scroll through a list of unread items like I would do with an old Usenet client, and I want it to be fast, easy, and predominately text based. With my browser, I want to go deeper into a subject.

Those are my somewhat incoherent thoughts and observations about combining NNW and Safari. Were I more awake and less stressed, this comment would have been much more lucid.

You might want to talk to Brent Simmon's (Weblog at http://inessiantial.com/). He is the author of NetNewsWire and he wrote about integrating a browser into NNW in his blog in Jan 9th, 10th and 17th and in fact wanted to use the WebCore and "embed the Safari layout engine" until you posted a message on your blog saying to wait for the Safari SDK, so from my reading of his blog, that is what he is doing.
His email is brent at ranchero dot com.

Yes, it would be useful for NNW if there was a good HTML rendering component in Cocoa so it didn't have to launch another application to handle opening a URL associated with a blog entry. And yes, it would be useful if Safari included RSS functionality.

It is my opinion that all this is necessary because of a fundamental problem with OSX: Application switching is *such* a pain in the ass. Why? Four reasons: 1) OSX is slow. Hardware may solve this eventually. 2) The whole menu-bar-at-the-top-one-app-at-a-time paradigm causes an annoying context switch between apps (at least for ex-linux (and presumably ex-windows) users). 3) This is no good way to switch between apps. Cmd-tab *kinda* works, but it's behavior beyond one app is amazingly poor: it cycles first to the last active app, then to the *next app in the dock*. Insanity. And, furthermore, you can't escape out of app switching. 4) When you bounce over to Safari (or Navigator) from NNW, read an article, and you close the Safari window, what happens? You sit there, with Safari still active, even though you are looking at NetNewsWires window. You have to reach for the mouse or keyboard over to NNW. That fact alone makes me often want to go back. (Then I think of mouse-over activation and virtual desktops and I get even more annoyed at OSX. Then I remember what it was like getting my digital camera kinda-sorta working, and I start to relax.)

LaunchBar lessens some of these problems (especially problem #3), but, at least on my G4 400 powermac, it's still ghetto.

Fudamental point: On windows/linux this wouldn't even be a problem because of the speed of the windowing environments and the way those windowmanagers treat individual windows. It could be argued that the OSX/Mac way is better in some cases, but here is one where it is clearly worse.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

Cheers,
Carson

There already is a way to autodiscover RSS feeds through the <link> tag. Look through the archives at for more info on it.

As far as the question of how to present it in the browser or newsreader, I like your ideas about the bookmarkish way of integrating them. I think that some work needs to be done to do some sort of incorporation in a way that pushes people to those sites that want the eyeballs. That way it makes RSS even more valuable.

Right now I know I hate just getting the headlines with no short blurb about the headline to tease me into going to the site. Typically it seems that those people who rely on advertizing don't want to give up the traffic to the site and simply rely on the RSS feed to advertize new content, not to push out some of that content.

Those people who want to save bandwidth seem to use an RSS feed as a true alternate view into their site. It's smaller, more compact and allows for a huge decrease in usage of their bandwith by only pushing out content when there actully is an update.

Now this is probably only the tip of the iceberg and other will probably tell me this is the most trivial comment on this whole issue, but it's what I think of when I think about how RSS affects the world.

As long as speed and apparent simplicity aren't affected, I say go for it!

I'm going to echo Erik's comments and the link to Daring Fireball. Safari's got a wonderful start towards being a world class web browser. If focusing on features like RSS support take away from the time spent on Safari's core functionality, then this is a bad thing.

As for the issue of switching between NNW and Safari, I only need to switch to a web browser for a small percentage of the items I read -- NNW is able to adequately handle most items.

Of course, the one feature I want in a web browser for use with NNW is tabbed browsing :) It's nice to switch over to Chimera after reading everything NNW has downloaded and having the articles lined up on top of each other is a single window. Furthermore, it's the one reason I haven't switched my default browser to Safari.

Just my $.02.

Dave,

I prefer my RSS reader outside of my browser for many reasons.

a) I don't have to wait for Apple to get around to fixing a bug or adding a cool feature. Ranchero has been very responsive.

b) the "read" data of my feed is not browser centric. Thus, if I change browsers, I don't "see" old news again.

c) If I change browsers to one that does not have rss built in, I'm SOL because maybe building RSS into Safari put Ranchero out of business

d) Safari should remain light

I really actually like just getting plain text in NNW. It helps me want to go to a site to get the full story, which then hits the sites ads, which makes them happy, too. Everybody wins.

My aggregator is my browser, or should I say the front end for my aggregator is a browser.

AmphetaDesk is a desktop application that runs as a mini-server, and uses whatever browser you like to present the feeds to you. Click, click, click, fill out those tabs and read it all without ever leaving your browser.

http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/

Not sure that I want to see a merger of NNW and Safari. However, I certainly would like to see recognition of RSS in the Internet preference panel.

That is, Mac OS X should allow a user to tell the system what RSS client they'd lilke to use. And certainly, perhaps using Apple events, there should be better integration between Safari and NNW or whatever RSS client the user has.

So in summary, as a result of Safari and the rise of blogging and RSS, it would be great for Apple to lead by putting all of the plumbing in place to make RSS work well in Mac OS X.

Concerning easing the subscription to feeds. Frontier / Radio Userland deals with this by using rss links in the form:

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml

Radio Userland runs on your system at port 5335 so it responds to these links and adds them to its feeds.

If you go to scripting.com you will see this link in the right column as a "Coffee Cup XML" graphic.

Lee Joramo

I would very much like to see an integration of NNW-like features into Safari. The separation of the two makes very little sense to me.

Authoring, on the other hand, seems to be out of scope for Safari, in my opinion.

Ob Safari Request: give us another Safari Beta. The savages are restless! :)

I'll add another vote for keeping RSS newsreading separate. Although it's an interesting idea to integrate them, I have to agree with what Ben Stanfield said. I prefer scanning through headlines quickly with NetNewsWire and then opening tabs in the background with Safari, and then giving them a once over again. I would wager that part of the reason why combining NNW and Safari feels frustrating and unnatural is the plethora of windows that it creates. In short, I think a tabbing implementation would go a long way towards cleaning this up, and wouldn't step on anyone's toes.

My other point is a more general one. I dislike "über" stuff in general. Mozilla and Emacs, to me, are cases in point. They're bloated, gigantic, and are simply more cumbersome to use than a few small, fast, separate, clean applications. It's nice to be able to mix and match, and replace components easily if a superior option becomes available. NetNewsWire happens to be a fabulous app, and I doubt it will be easily surpassed, but the general point stands: you should be able to use whatever newsreader you want in combination with whatever browser you want.

A few other miscellaneous points. First, I think that OmniWeb's bookmark scheduling/updating mechanism is nice in general, and would be a nice addition to Safari regardless of your decision on RSS. It can be used to simulate similar functionality for people who are not as into news headlines or blogs. Second, I agree that Safari has bigger fish to fry before possible RSS integration and other such features should be worked on. Third, it's nice to have specialized apps that do just what they need to do, and do them well. Fourth, I dig tabs. I repeated myself on the last two, but ... some things bear repeating. :)

In summary, add things that will make Safari work better with apps like NNW, but don't actually consolidate the functionality. It's nicer the way it is now, and people can go use a behemoth like Mozilla if they really like all that junk messily smashed together under one roof.

Imagine (for a fast-forwarded moment) that NNW had incorporated WebCore. Would we be having this discussion? What would/could Safari offer over NNW+WebCore for RSS?

KISS...

Stop being so dramatic about the whole thing, all your really need is a (perl)script that download these files, and then add/update them in your bookmarkfile; preferably in a "folder" you've got on the "Bookmarks Bar".

Best would of course be if there's an official way of doing that, so that developers don't have to work directly with the bookmarks and so that you as a user can chose what special folders you want to view (just as you do today with "Address Book" and "Rendezvous"). (Would be nice to be able to change the colour of the text to show if there's been any changes.)

Yes, that would be very basic, but if you want a more powerful way of doing it then just don't use that feature and stay with whatever it is that you're using today.

I've tried to sum up the arguments here:
http://www.padawan.info/web/the_almighty_web_browser.html

On a side note on your last paragraph Dave, Movable Type is not limited to web editing through a browser. You can use NetNewsWire Pro to edit a MT-driven blog, and it brings you all the advantages of a desktop application.

Interesting ideas, some good, some bad.

The bookmark updates idea is nice and all browsers should follow OmniWeb's lead on this. Safari especially as it seems to be looking to cater for bookmarkers.

A nice way to subscribe to a feed would be good, but I would want it to be handled by an app of my choice and it would think it distinctly not cricket if Apple implemented it otherwise.

The core question is: why are you reading these stories in an RSS reader in the first place? What is the value-add that browsers could not provide.

With this in mind surely attempts to make RSS more like a webpage are like early television shows that were radio with pictures or early brochure-ware webpages.

Is one of the (perhaps, non-obvious) benefits of RSS not that the text is divorced from presentation, thus allowing easier repurposing away from the origial context.

The RSS crowd is still in a phase of self discovery, perhaps the local 800lb gorilla is best to follow along, adding polish to core concepts rather than trying to be a trendsetter. Leave that to the nimble and they may surprise you, I find people generally do if you give them the chance.

Finally, I simply cannot believe that you can entertain, even for a moment, the thought of NNWlite adding tabs to its interface.

For the love of god, why?

It already has a list of sites and a list of stories, easily readable and navigable using the standard idioms and shortcuts.

I feel tab-mania is clouding your judgement here. Either that or you're trolling for hits from your tab groupies.

Tssh...
Now who's idea was this anyway?

http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=2266

"You speculate on NetNewsWire using the Safari WebKit to display HTML, but how about turning it around? Why not include an RSS reader in Safari? It would make way more sense to me: Subscriptions and descriptions in a bookmarks-page layout, the whole iTunes look-and-feel...
Keep the web where you meet it first; the Browser.
Now go and ask Steve, he'll agree with me.

Posted by titato at January 21, 2003 03:38 PM "

"The core question is: why are you reading these stories in an RSS reader in the first place?"

Personally I'd never do that, I just use RSS to find out a) if there's anything new, and b) if the new article is one that I might want to read; and most of the time the title is all that I need pre going to the website.

I'm using SlashDock in the, surprise surprise, dock, and the perfect RSS/RDF/Slash[whatevertheycallit]-program for me would be to have SlashDock either in the menu bar or the bookmarksbar in Safari.

Regarding that comment about keeping things where they belong... There ought to be a single location for all your RSS-settings, then you could use whatever program you want to view them; that way most programmers can focus on the UI instead of when to get what from where.

Soooo... who's going to write iRSS? =)

I've only recently got into rss as a result of reading Davids comments on here about NetNewsWire, I downloaded it and now I love it.
I found this article particularly interesting as well as the debate that has followed in the comments here, to add to the mix, while the idea of integrating feed support into Safari sounds great, I think I'd have to disagree with Davids suggested implementation whereby the feeds link into the bookmarks. Instead I'd love to see something very much like the Safari bookmark manager, a layout similar to NetNewsWire which would allow me to open new tabs behind the feed list. I'm a big fan of going through a bunch of headlines, opening the ones that interest me and then setting about reading through them rather than clicking one and then reading it.

Good article.

please don't go moz on us.
please.

i know it's being said that rss is the greatest, and there's no doubt it's cool, but give us an accurate and fast browser that supports standards before worrying about anything else.

though i do have to say, anyone reading your site probably already has joined the minority you mention, and so our input... well, it's not exactly representative of mac users (or any other users) in general.

just thoughts,
wil.

Keep in mind as you look at this type of functionality that we also need to consider its use in organizations, not just individual users. Think of a company that has a web portal for most of its internal information flow. If RSS functionality was built in users could get alerts on their desktop. Further the integration, if done right, could increase ease of use and therefore decrease training costs. Although, if both apps were developed by the same company, those issues may be moot if they played well together.

I agree with the folks who say they should remain separate applications, but: I think there is room for tabs in NNW, but maybe not like you're thinking.

In the lower right pane, I think it could be useful to have three (and only three) tabs across the top of the pane for all feeds: Entry view, Link view, Home view. (What's there now is the Entry only.) Link would take you to the primary link in the entry, and Home would take you to the feed's home page. Use Cmd-[ and Cmd-] (or something like it) to switch between views. Then you *could* do all your RSS-related browsing from within NNW if you wanted.

I'm not sure I'd want this, but it's a plausible extension to me. Maybe I'll put together a screen shot.

Regardless, you don't have to do anything special to Safari (other than add a default protocol handler for the RSS mime types).

Dave et al:

Take your idea about Safari doing RSS on-step further.
If would be really cool (IMHO) to see integration between
Safari (as an RSS viewer) and iCal.

Through iCal you could subscribe to the feeds like you would a normal calendar. When the feed is updated, the new story appears as an event in that calendar.

When opened iCal kicks off Safari to diplay the feed.

:) This might be a lame idea, but it beats reloading slashdot, etc a million times a day to see if things have been updated.

--CMP

I'm in favor of keeping them separate, for many of the reasons stated above, the biggest being that browser makers should focus on simply rendering pages perfectly to the specification and as quickly as possible before they think about another damn thing.

I would add though that adding a rendering engine to NetNewsWire (and the ability to grab the author's stylesheet) would be great. I just wish I (the user, not necessarily Jay Allen) could PICK which rendering engine to use for both NNW and the browsers.

Ahh, but now I'm dreaming.

Chris, download NetNewsWire and subscribe to the RSS feed. Problem solved.

It's not that complicated to turn an RSS-feed into an iCalendar-format; there are several modules for several languages available that could be used, and even online services that requires nothing more than you entering an URL, getting another URL back and then subscribing to that new URL.

Keep applications small and separate. If you want to have NNW inside of Safari, tell Steve to resurrect OpenDoc ;). Otherwise, keep RSS out of Safari - with one exception: let Safari be able to browse the "link" tags and (perhaps) create a menu out of them. I think I've seen this functionality in Mozilla. If there's a link tag for the author whose link is an email address, this menu could have "email the author of this page". If there's an RSS link and the user has an RSS reader installed, another menu item could be "Subscribe to RSS Feed", which would send an event to the RSS reader to subscribe to said feed.

But don't turn Safari into another bloated Communicator Suite (unless it comes back as Cyberdog ;)

I think turning Safari into some giant application with RSS functionality on a par with NNW is mistake. It's the easy way out.

The main problem I see with embedded web content in non-browser apps is that the user will become frustrated if they follow too many links and start to miss the functionality of their browser. Perhaps more extensive sharedWorkspace functionality is needed, allowing drag and drop (and keyboard, of course) movement of browser panes and associated histories across applications.

Rather than integrate a feed reader into a web-browser, or vice versa, why not better integrate all web related activities. For instance, I rotate between three different web browsers on my machine. That's three different caches, three different history and bookmark files, three different password setups. Add apps like Sherlock, Watson and NNW to the mix and I'm looking at as many as six different way to access the web, none of which talk to one another.

Integrate some of these services. NNW doesn't "know" when I've already read a blog in my web browser. The article shows up as unread in NNW, despite the fact that I just read it in Safari. That's silly to me. Why can't NNW check against a universal web cache to see what pages I've read or not? Safari can't read my Chimera bookmark file (well, not without some prodding). That's totally insane! There should be one bookmark file that all my web apps look at. Make it open, XML-based, add a Cocoa class that can read and write to it.

This, to me, is what WebCore is all about. A good HTML engine is just the first step. Apple shoud integrate all web features, like bookmarks and cache, then build an API that anyone can link to, and keep it open. If Chimera still wants to use Gecko to render pages, that's fine, but they should also be able to use my WebCore Bookmarks, too.

An uber-app of any kind is going in the wrong direction. An uber-framework is a much more Mac-like approach.

Even better, I think, there is really an opportunity for the digital Hub. And to help the application to communicate a bit more. For example, it would be lovely to have an interaction with ical, iphoto, etc.

Morning has arrived you check your email (Mail or Eudora), you read the RSS feed (NetNewsWire), you want to start to blog, you launch your Safari browser, which contains an application to edit the most common weblogs API (you can edit directly from the browser, not forms, but XML-RPC, MT, Radio, LiveJournal), You update the calendar, your calendar is on a place on the web and accessible to people. When you blog, it creates an entry to your RSS feed, but also in your Calendar in your weblog.ics.

You have taken pictures today, you download them from your computer, you saved them in your dated space, and you create almost automagically a new entry for your weblog, RSS feed, calendar photo.ics, etc.

You want to include your iTunes listening, you click in the preferences panel a button, and you have an automatic generation of data which are displayed on your weblog too.

etc, etc, etc.... all of this is really simply achievable.

Hey, who needs tabs when there's Minimize in Place ;)

I would like to note that my reading pattern for RSS feeds is about the same as reading a site like slashdot: I open links that look interesting for future reading. (This is why I currently like tabbed browsers.) But when all these complaints about the lack of tabs in Safari came up, I realized that tabs are not what I would like at all! What I would really like is the ability to create "short term serialized bookmarks". I work through the news feeds in NetNewsWire and click the articles I want to read, which would then be put in the "To Read Queue". When i'm done scanning the feeds I start reading the articles. If an article links to more sites I want to investigate, I would like to be put in the queue after the current url, but before the next article. ( Am I making sense at all? ). This way you would be able to navigate the pages you select in the order in which you found them. This also means that RSS feeds need not be an integral part of Safari, only a method to queue up new pages. (Now that I think of it some more, I realize that this all a form of history browsing into the future.) I can at least promise you, that if such a feature is ever implemented in Safari, I will never complain about the lack of tabs :-) This would also be good way to way to allow the browser to fetch pages that I'm about to read, making them available instantly, making Safari seem even faster than it is now. ( Assuming the next page can be loaded before I finish reading the page I'm reading now.)

But then again, I might be crazy....

an rss viewer belongs in sherlock, not safari. safari should stick to the minimalistic roots that make it so great.

I personally think that thinking about RSS with browsing combined in some way is simply another symptom of the growing pains that are going on in the more general XML-based world. I highly encourage everyone to take a moment and read this article from Anil Dash:
http://www.dashes.com/magazine/backissues/introducing_the_microcontent_client.php

With the key statement being:
The microcontent client is an extensible desktop application based around standard Internet protocols that leverages existing web technologies to find, navigate, collect, and author chunks of content for consumption by either the microcontent browser or a standard web browser. The primary advantage of the microcontent client over existing Internet technologies is that it will enable the sharing of meme-sized chunks of information using a consistent set of navigation, user interface, storage, and networking technologies. In short, a better user interface for task-based activities, and a more powerful system for reading, searching, annotating, reviewing, and other information-based activities on the Internet.

So the idea of having an RSS viewer in a browser or a browser in an RSS aggregator leads to such contradictory answers is that you are asking the wrong question :) There's a greater issue here of creating an application which can take in data - whatever format - and display it in a consistent way which takes advantage of metadata either from the author, the reader, or auto-created by the usage (ie: I read this 5 times already)

Please - Dave - read that article!

There's really nothing to disagree with in that article, but it basically describes an application that looks and acts like something for viewing database records. Is it really much different than a Visual Basic application for interacting with MS Access?

I don't think this type of interface is incompatible with 'documents'-- look at iTunes. Why shouldn't an RSS reader be able to "play" the page in question?

Oh yea, here's a screenshot: http://homepage.mac.com/dsorel/.Pictures/MiscWebPhotos/NoTabs.jpg

What about a plug-in system/sdk? In that way safari can still focus on browsing/rendering and the good people @ rancheros could integrate NNW

Dale Sorel, I have 2 questions.

1) What was that screenshot intended to show?

2) What's up with your navigation buttons?

Kevin,

The screen shot is meant to show how you can have the minimized windows and the minimize button in close proximity. Pretty fast, IMO.

I got the navigation buttons at ResExcellence.

In a way, this almost sounds like the the site subscription tool that Mac IE 5 has. The problem with what IE is doing is that it looking at the modification dates of a single web page. In many cases, a change in The modification date of a single file doesn't mean that content is new. Being able to subsscribe to an RSS feed, much like in NetNewsWire form within a browser woudl seriously Rock.

one more vote for keeping it separate. Once you get tabs that open in the background in Safari, the whole process will be very smooth...

Hi

I thought I might let you know about a new RSS client that I've been working on recently. While it's a Windows app (oh no!), it might still be of interest to you since I am trying to build the uber-browser of which you spoke.

One of the key features it provides is scripted channels. You can write scripts in any language (samples are provided in Python, Java and C++) that will be called whenever it's time to update a channel. They simply print out an RSS feed to the console and the app parses it from there. One of the samples queries a database and return the rows as an RSS feed. I'm sure you can see the power inherent in this.

It will be released publicly in a few weeks but the first release candidate and screenshots are available here: http://www.awasu.net/beta7.

And it has tabbed browsing, if you want it :-) I agree with you that people who use RSS clients tend to browse fairly quickly and everyone who's tried it has loved it. The Anil Dash article posted above is absolutely spot on, IMHO, and this is the application we're trying to build. Thanks for the link!

Hehe reading all of these comments remind me of sitting at a WWDC listneing to the wonders of OpenDoc.

ie, build your own little document that has parts of Safari here, parts of NWW there.....

Bloated is not better. Integration via APIs is where it is at, and I like the way it works at the moment. Otherwise I've got a darn drawer taking up lateral screen space, or a well, or a panel or something. RIght now my screen space is called the Dock, and I can click on NNW, click next, until I see something, then bring safari fwd (full screen) and read the story.

And again, I then get to use NNW with any browser, NWW gets to innovate (like adding posting to my blog, sweet) and Safari stays lighter.

Remember OpenDoc - And where it is today.

I think you guys are missing the point. Most of us (power users who read the blog of a web browser programmer) can get NNW or something similar for our RSS feeds if we want. But what David is suggesting is a very forward thinking idea that will bring REAL value to average end-users and will ultimately grow RSS and benefit us all. RSS should be integrated. This is not Mozilla like at all. It's a simple and obvious extension that makes sense. It is absolutely the type of thing Apple would do, and do well. It's a great, great idea.

One could make the case that a program like NNW only exists because the functionality isn't already in the browser where it belongs.

John

well safari COULD implement a plugin architecture of some type which would allow people to add and remove some functionality. apple would release safari as a stand alone web browser, which by user need, be customized. brent could write nnw plugins for safari. but if you felt like that functionality was too much, you pull it out and have a nice fast browser.

Dave wrote:

"OmniWeb already contains a very nice bookmark scheduling/updating mechanism."

Which was copied from Internet Explorer 4's "Subscriptions" feature BTW.

<plug>
And FWIW, that's exactly what I use to keep track of all the blogs I read. It's not perfect (neither is any RSS UA), but it works well, and provides an offline cache to boot, so I can read all the blogs I'm following when I'm at a cafe without wifi (yes, there are still a few SF cafes that are out of range of any open wifi nodes).
</plug>

Steve Riggin's wrote:

"Remember OpenDoc - And where it is today."

Don't forget Cyberdog either. And they are where they are today because they got Steve'd. Which, in a law-of-unintended-consequences kind of way, had a lot to do with some of the folks that worked on it ending up at Microsoft helping create IE/Mac.

Dave - see if you can unearth the API docs on Cyberdog - most of this stuff has all been figured out already (by Apple for that matter). Here's a starting point: Cyberdog Programmer's Kit
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/Legacy/Cyberdog/Cyberdog-2.html

Actually, I have implemented an RSS browser of a sort into Sherlock, via my WorldNews channel (sherlock://homepage.mac.com/denboer/WorldNews.xml?action=add).

I am changing it right now so that users can add their own rss feeds, but the nice thing I did for many of the news sources is only display the printable article, without the ads and such, which would be more difficult (impossible) to do with a user supplied feed.

Mozilla can already do RSS. Neil from XulPlanet has been working on an Unnamed Semantic Web Client.

http://www.xulplanet.com/cgi-bin/ndeakin/homeN.cgi?ai=37

Here's a screenshot of it doing RSS feeds:

http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/images/blogview.png

I think tabbed browsing could solve some of the mentioned issue, while leaving NetNewsWire and Safari as separate but complimentary applications. I love that Safari is fast and lean, and definitely weigh in at keeping it that way. That said, tabs rock. Nothing is quite so great as opening NetNewsWire, picking an area of interest (I group my feeds, so I see quick summaries like: Pop Culture (35 entries); PHP & MySQL (6 entries); Apple & OS X (45 entries); etc.) Then just loading titles of interest to to tabs in my browser. This works out well, especially since it keeps the articles loaded ad allows me to read them offline while on the bus, at client sites, or when traveling.

I do agree that subscribing to RSS feeds is a bit cumbersome. One-Click Subscriptions would rock.

I admit to reading Kotte's post and thinking components of the browser he described would be super-cool, but I'm not certain how I feel about Safari being that browser. Of course some components wouldn't require too much bloat like being able to select which search engine to use. Personally, I like Google, but I love AllTheWeb, and seem to go back and forth between Alltheweb, Google, and kartoo.

So I vote for tabs, better integration, and two separate apps. Of course, I also vote for making NetNewsWire a bit more emory resident (like iChat), where you can log-in and have news download in the background, without opening the application until your ready to peruse. So a little black and white icon could sit beside my TigerLaunch or iChat icon, with the options to be Offline, Download, a space for customized downloads like with iChat status area (say just download feeds from Pop Culture (group) and Shifted Libraries (rss), then follow the user customize area with quick access to Blog Posting, and then the Browse which would launch NetNewsWire fully.

That would be very cool, and provide the perfect opportunity for better integration between Safari and NetNewsWire, by allowing all News Items (from a customized download) to be opened as tabs in Safari without fully launching NetNewsWire.

all this talk of cyberdog is getting me all nostalgic. regardless of what the nay-sayers think, it was the greatest innovation in the app/doc structure ever. i was hoping that if apple did make a browser for osx, it would be called CyberDog 3.0 (not that i don't like Safari). osx seems incredibly well suited to the opendoc paradigm and if i knew how to program (maybe this is a good reason to learn), i'd write some kind of framework to provide the functionality. immagine opening up a webcore rendered page right from the finder...

NetNewsWire should embed WebKit (when it's done). Then we could have a Mac application like the excellent NewzCrawler.

http://www.newzcrawler.com/images/scrshots/main1.gif

I think integrated RSS support would be very cool. I like the idea of making the GUI similar to the existing bookmark/history/rendezvous interface, with the addition of an indicator to show "new" content. The hardest part would be coming up with a good name for that section of the bookmarks. ("RSS" isn't too great for the users)

Apple could even have an RSS subscription page much like the iCal calendar subscription page. They could make arrangements with various content providers to get permission to list various feeds (news, sports, entertainment, etc.) on the site. (Apple could also supply some of its own .. an RSS feed for new QuickTime movie trailers, etc.)

Dale Sorel: Man, that MinimizeInPlace is damn cool! I never heard about it before, but it rocks! Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Kevin,

Your welcome. You can get MIP here: http://mcgavern.com/mac/mip/

Feature creep. Mozilla-itis. Don't do it.

Re: RSS

If it can be done tastefully and bloat-free, make it happen. The beta v51 download is approx 3MB which is part of the appeal; would be best kept as small as possible. Sounds like you have this fairly well thought out already :]

Re: blog editing app

I don't believe it's necessary in a browser, and think it's most acessible through the existing web interfaces. A relatively small percent of "netziens" would make use of such a feature anyway. Though I do like to see innovative ideas like this, keep it up!

But yes, standards, speed and accuracy first.

I also use NetNewsWire, and to be honest I use it because it gets me just the right amount of data from many sites quickly - without having to manually load up heavy image laden sites in a browser.. (bandwidth and time savings - what a concept..)

Take the bookmarks feature in Safari, duplicate it, and make a RSS viewer.. (Allow it to update every 10 minutes, and speak incoming headlines.. ; )

Sherlock!

A NewsWire type app should be integrated into Sherlock, along with HTML rendering ability.
Similar to apple's movies/ebay channel, users can click on an article and then view it directly in Sherlock.

Safari needs tabs. Pulleease!

I think we should encourage as many seperate applications as possable. You have this "webCore" concept which is broadly applicable to a variety of application functions viz internet access. Apple may not owe it to 3rd party developers but they need to take a quantum leap in development capability, and to make up for grabbing the "lime light" aplication space on the Macintosh platform.

Your interapplication communication is currently workable for many situations... but what if you had a capability within webCore to communicate via shared memory (with semiphore locks) detailed browser content. Making the browser a intelligent partner application for 3rd parties. Moving blocks of information between the two in an orderly and dependable fashon.

Apple needs to lend a strong hand to 3rd party developers who want to make a living writing Mac software, and this is perhaps one way that they can continue to do so.

Er, fag-ending this conversation rather. But I was struck by the line 'I've heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for "geeks" and "blogging enthusiasts," but I simply don't believe that to be true.'

Darn right. Looking for a model for a blog aggregator that works for the common man? LiveJournal friends pages. This is the killer feature of LiveJournal; the friends page automatically aggregates all the LiveJournals (which are just blogs, of course) you're interested in reading, and it puts them in time order, and (critical this) includes the comments in the aggregator. And it's insanely, wildly popular with loads of people who aren't remotely geeky.

where do i get safari plug-ins?????

Innouncement!!!