Frustrating User Experiences: iPhone NetNewsWire and Newsgator
I love NetNewsWire. I still prefer it on the Mac, and was jazzed to get it on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the picture above is normally about as far as I get with the iPhone NetNewsWire application.
I am sure that the problem is that I have many feeds. Too many for the application to handle. I wanted to give it a hand, and setup a profile of only the feeds that I really care about. I have folders already setup on my desktop application for this. I have the ‘must read’ folder, and then other ancillary ones.
Newsgator has thought about this, and gives you the ability to setup different profiles for various devices and systems, but the UI is awful, and misses the key feature that I need. As you can see below, when you have a profile, you can’t just select an entire folder, but instead you get a list of feeds! This means that I would have to go through all of my feeds and manually select the ones from my ‘must read’ list! And, what about when you add a new feed? You have to go in and select it for that profile then too? Ugh, do I really have to migrate everything to Google Reader?
September 25th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Every single gripe I’ve had about NNW for the iPhone has been fixed on subsequent updates. Blogging/Twittering about it is good but filing bug reports/feature requests is even better. They’re amazingly responsive. I posted about obscure issues relating to Mozilla Prism screwing up NNW’s ability to open links in my default browser and got immediate back-and-forth dialogue with the developer.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Hey, blogosphere synchronicity, as I was just reading NNW iPhone stats yesterday. You must be the guy they’re talking about!
“One NetNewsWire/iPhone user has over 2,800 feeds — wow!”
That must be how many it got to before you quit. :-)
http://blogs.newsgator.com/newsgator_widget_blog/2008/09/netnewswire-iph.html
You should ask them for your prize.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
If you can get the iPhone app to load your massive feed library, you can then begin deleting the feeds from the iPhone app. Each time you delete one, it will ask if you want to remove it from your NewsGator account entirely, or simply exclude it from your iPhone profile.
This process can take awhile, but if the iPhone can cope (if only just) with your full feed list to begin with, it’s easier than picking feeds out of the flattened, alphabetical list online.
September 26th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Brian,
Brent is awesome. The main issue is on the NewsGator side, and not having a way to nicely tie profiles to a particular directory. If that was fixed, then I am sure everything would be OK :)
Cheers,
Dion
September 26th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Wes,
I have some feeds… but not quite that many! :)
September 28th, 2008 at 6:32 am
google reader is better anyway, i feel
nice blog! i hav bookmarked urs!
http://dailytechnoapps.blogspot.com/
October 13th, 2009 at 8:23 am
It could be the number of feeds but I have the same problem as you (crashing at the same point) and I have under 15 feeds. NNW crashed on an article from Wired. Of course when it re-starts it tries to show what it was last looking at again, doesn’t like it and crashes again.