Brent Simmons is the 36-year-old developer behind the highly acclaimed Mac OS X feed reader NetNewsWire. His company, Ranchero Software, started in 1995, was put on hold for several years while Simmons worked for UserLand. In 2002, he and his wife Sheila "rebooted" Ranchero, and shortly thereafter NetNewsWire was born. A public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 is set to be released in June.

Harold Check: How do you approach developing NetNewsWire? Do you have a vision you're working towards, or is user feedback the main driver behind changes to the software?

Brent Simmons: Both. The upcoming NetNewsWire upgrade will have lots of changes, and Sheila and I both have our hands firmly placed on the rudder. (Ranchero Software is a  mom-and-pop operation.) NetNewsWire is the result of our vision.

At the same time, we rely very heavily on user feedback. For instance, we have a fantastic group of testers, who do much more than just report bugs ? they make great feature requests and provide feedback on user interface design. Some of the testers are accomplished developers themselves, and it's fairly usual to find a couple user interface mock-ups in my Inbox in the morning.

I don't think you can separate the two things ? vision-driven vs. user-feedback-driven. Our vision is partly a result of what people tell us about NetNewsWire. And our overall vision includes lots of room for feedback: it's nimble in the right places.

HC: What do you make of the standards wars? As a developer, does it bother you to spend time addressing multiple formats and the uncertainty of future formats? Are you in touch with any of the keepers of the current standards?

BS: My job is to treat Atom and RSS as peers, and to do a great job supporting both formats. I do not prefer one over the other, and I go out of my way to stay far away from the fighting. (One of the beautiful parts of newsreaders is the Unsubscribe button.)

Most people don't care about the fighting ? they just want good software. So that's what I focus on.

On the bright side, all this fighting does indicate something important, that syndication is a wonderful technology worth getting fired-up about. It is. Even though I work on it at the plumbing level, it still seems a bit like magic to me.

HC: One of the most compelling features of NetNewsWire is the control you offer users of their reading experience. What's the most compelling feature of web-based feed readers, in your opinion? Can you ever see a point where NetNewsWire might have a server-side element?

BS: The best part of web-based feed readers is probably that you can get to your account anywhere there's a web browser. For some people that's utterly crucial; for other people, not so much.

There are people who use web-based email too, some because it's the only option that makes sense for them, others just because they like it for some reason.

I can definitely see a future where NetNewsWire has a server-side element. In fact, my background is in writing server-side code and doing web apps: I did that for many years before writing NetNewsWire.

However, the first thing to do is synching (which will appear in the next release of NetNewsWire). For people who use just a few computers regularly, synching will allow you to copy your feeds and the read/unread status of items to different computers.

But in a future release I can easily imagine integrating with a server-side system. Perhaps Bloglines, perhaps Feedster, perhaps something else.

I would much rather integrate with an existing service than write my own, even
though I have the experience to do it. Here's why:

1. I could continue to concentrate on the desktop application, and leave all the server-side programming to someone else. This means the application would be of higher quality than if I split my time.
2. I wouldn't have to stay up nights worrying about the privacy and security of users' data on my servers. This is best left to people who work on the server all day every day: it's not a job for part-time server-side developers.
3. I like partnerships. An emotional reason, certainly ? but I just find it more fun to work with other people on things like this.

HC: Just as bookmarks (and bookmark managers) became less useful as the number of websites skyrocketed, will the same thing happen when syndication becomes more pervasive?

BS: The proliferation of websites didn't make *browsers* less useful, they just overwhelmend bookmark managers. I don't think the proliferation of feeds will make newsreaders less pervasive. It will mean some user interface additions, though.

Here are a few examples of features that appear in some other newsreaders, and will appear in the next NetNewsWire, that exist in part because of the proliferation of feeds.

1. Search results feeds. Feedster is an example: You know how you can go to feedster.com and run a search? Well, you can also make a feed out of that search. So if, for instance, you're interested in all mentions of "Apache" everywhere, you'd create a feed that does a search on "Apache" at Feedster. You don't have to be subscribed to all feeds everywhere, you have Feedster do it for you.
2. Smart feeds. Maybe you yourself have subscribed to a few hundred feeds, and you want certain things to bubble up. Again, say you're interested in mentions of "Apache" ? so you'd create a smart feed that shows all unread items whose title or description contains the word "Apache." This kind of thing allows you to subscribe to more feeds but also have the more interesting items make themselves more prominent.
3. Plain old searching. Just like in most mail applications, you have a search box, type a search string, and get a list of matching items.

There are lots of other ideas, too ? feed/items ratings, collaborative filtering, Bayesian filtering.

The question is, can newsreaders grow to make it ever easier to deal with yet more data? Answer: they can. Like everything else, it takes time to do the work, but the work is being done. We're still at the very beginning of all this.

HC: Lately, you've been posting a lot about interoperability between feed readers and weblog editors, and about the notion of feed readers as "RSS routers," able to seemlessy move information to email, the web, databases, SMS, or whatever. Why are you choosing to cooperate with other developers rather than just build those features into NetNewsWire?

BC: The main thing for me is that it's *fun.* I enjoy working with other developers, and it just knocks me out when apps written by different developers work together. So my motives are, actually, rather selfish.

I could take another approach ? just build up NetNewsWire until it's some huge Ranchero RSS Office Suite ? but no way. I wouldn't like it, and users wouldn't like it, and other developers wouldn't like it.

There's a tradition among Mac developers of working together on things like this. It's my belief that this tradition isn't self-sacrificing, it's enlightened self-interest.

It's entirely likely that more good ideas like this will come along ? some will come from Ranchero Software, and some will come from other developers, and I'm just as happy to work with them on their ideas as on mine.

But, for me, this is a huge part of why I'm a developer at all. I love this stuff.