Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

An open letter to David Watanabe

Dear David Watanabe (for whom I cannot find a direct email address),

I’m a huge fan of your NewsFire RSS client, as discussed here, here, and here. I even got a second NewsFire license in a MacZot bundle. For an application that served me so well for so long, it has proved to be a far higher value than the nominal price you charge for it.

But recently, I became a two-Mac user for the first time, and if I want to use NewsFire as my RSS reader on both, it has no way to synchronize my feeds and “read/unread” item status. NetNewsWire offers this, and having just made their software free, I switched to it a few weeks ago solely for the synchronization feature.

But NetNewsWire is completely inferior to your excellent NewsFire. I don’t know why the vocal Mac community is so fond of NNW — maybe they’re still thinking like Windows users. NNW sucks. You know this, too, which is probably why NewsFire exists and is so good. And web-based RSS readers can’t even compare.

Maybe you’re discouraged because NewsFire isn’t the dominant RSS reader. I hope not, because Apple isn’t the dominant computer manufacturer either, and they still find it worthwhile to produce high-quality products for the people who value quality and great design.

Please develop and release an update to NewsFire that synchronizes between multiple computers.

Thank you for your consideration.

Marco Arment

(If anyone has his contact info, please pass this along or give me his email address.)