Yesterday I wondered aloud why RSS readers look like email clients.
@brentsimmons replied. Turns out he borrowed that layout for NetNewsWire in 2002 — and twenty years later, he's asking why no one's tried something different.
That conversation became an essay. I built a visual version (with an ASCII fallback).
Back in the day, when you’d read the paper or watched the daily newscast on TV, if you didn’t get all of it, that’s ok, you just move on and catch the news again tomorrow. No pressure to read or watch everything every day.
At the moment we have rss news readers the unread news keep accumulating if you don’t read it all and there’s this pressure to read everything everyday
this is the kind of writing i'm always on the lookout for, subject, sphere, style, clarity
@tg @brentsimmons I built a feed reader called Stream that gives you a river of news view. That’s it. No list of blogs. Just a stream of news with a detail view when you select a row. It’s iOS only at the moment but it is coming for Mac.
@fahrni @tg @brentsimmons I mocked up an interface prototype on top of my NetNewsWire database to see what might be possible. https://darcynorman.net/2026/01/29/experimenting-with-rss-reader-interfaces/
@fahrni not available in germany
@cptpudding I’m sorry. I need to get signed up to a special Apple program that will let me list things in the EU App Stores. 😔
@fahrni Yes, the classic EU debate. I didn’t think you’d deliberately excluded us but I liked the app idea.
@cptpudding I’ve applied to the program but Apple kicked it back to me asking for more information and I’ve been dragging my feet.
@tg @brentsimmons FeedLand by @davew uses the River metaphor.
thanks chuck. it's amazing to me someone could say something like that but that's where we are, a time when people just believe there's nothing new.
https://feedland.com/ is the place to start.
of if you want to get a quick look at what it's like using it.
that's the collection of feeds i follow.
help us get the word out.
@davew @cagrimmett @tg @brentsimmons Nothing against feedland or your news site (both are great, and thanks for the service), but the UI implementation you point to is not particularly new, different, or innovative. It pretty closely follows the existing paradigm - a list of links with excerpts (left pane of an email client) which when clicked open a new tab/window (right pane/window) of an email client.
@mayo @cagrimmett @tg @brentsimmons
could you post a screen shot of what you're looking at? i have a feeling you're describing a different product. ;-)
