Today Comes to the Mac
When I launched Today on iOS last October, it was born out of that same Google Reader-shaped hole that never quite healed. A few months later, I kept finding myself reaching for it on my Mac — opening feeds on my phone while sitting in front of a perfectly good laptop. So I did something about it.
Today – An RSS Reader is now available on the Mac App Store.
Not Just a Bigger iPhone App
The easy path would have been to ship the iPad version with Mac Catalyst and call it a day. But that never feels right. A Mac app should feel like a Mac app — keyboard shortcuts, proper window management, menus in the menu bar.
Today on Mac uses a three-column layout: your feeds in the sidebar, articles in the middle, and the full article on the right. It’s the kind of layout that just makes sense when you have the screen real estate, and it makes triaging a busy morning of feeds feel effortless.
Keyboard Everything
This is the feature I keep coming back to. You can navigate the entire app without lifting your hands off the keyboard:
- J/K to move between articles — borrowed from Gmail, Vim, and the late great Google Reader
- Space to page through an article, then automatically advance to the next one when you hit the bottom
- Arrow keys to flip through image galleries
- Cmd+F to favorite, Cmd+U for read/unread, Cmd+O to pop it open in Safari
It’s the kind of flow where you can rip through 50 articles before your coffee gets cold.
Podcasts Get Their Own Window
On iOS, the Now Playing view is a sheet that slides up. On Mac, it felt wrong — you’d lose your article context. So podcasts open in their own dedicated window that you can move, resize, or tuck into a corner. It opens automatically when you start a podcast and supports chapter navigation, playback speed controls, and keyboard shortcuts (arrow keys to skip, space to pause).
The SwiftUI of It All
Bringing an iOS SwiftUI app to macOS is about 80% magical and 20% “why is this happening.” The data layer, most views, and the navigation structure just work. But then you discover that app-level menu commands silently swallow keyboard events before your views ever see them, and suddenly you’re routing key presses through NotificationCenter like it’s 2009. Window management was its own adventure — WindowGroup and @Environment(\.openWindow) are genuinely elegant once you crack the incantation.
The 80% that just works is remarkable, though. SwiftData, async/await, the entire service layer — zero changes between platforms. That’s the promise of SwiftUI actually delivering.
What’s Included
- Native three-column Mac layout with sidebar
- Full keyboard navigation (J/K, arrows, space, and more)
- Dedicated Now Playing window with chapter support
- Podcast playback with adjustable speed
- AI article summaries (still local-first)
- OPML import and export
- Reddit feed support with full media previews
- Custom accent colors
- Background sync
Get It
Today – An RSS Reader is free on the Mac App Store. If you’ve been using Today on your phone, you’ll feel right at home. If you’re new — welcome. RSS is alive and well.
P.S. — The iOS version continues to get updates (just landed iPad support) alongside the Mac release. Same codebase, same SwiftData store, same love for the open web.
#development #iOS #MacOS #NerdyStuff #RSS #Swift #Today