NetNewsWire:

One of the tentpole features of the new NetNewsWire release is sync. After considering (and implementing) different options, we elected to develop our own proprietary sync service in-house. The sync service keeps the different sites you follow — and how you’ve organized them — consistent between your various devices, as well as coordinating which articles are still read and which are still new.

At the present time, we’re not going to offer support for third-party sync systems, because we intend to offer something much better for the customers that use our products.

Independence

Historically, NetNewsWire has been plagued with issues when dependent on third-party sync. An app as long-lived as this one sees a lot of changes, and we didn’t want to have another sync service, like Google Reader, pulled out from under us unexpectedly.

Secondly, the eruption of people stepping forward with sync services were primarily new and unknown. We were concerned about tying our future to a sync service provider that could go away. Additionally, the hoops we’d have to jump through to add compatibility with yet another third-party service before we even shipped would have added considerable complexity to the development process.

Now all the responsibility and problems are our own to deal with, but we can also do a lot more that wouldn’t be possible with a generic third-party service.

Capability

We are mostly known for mobile and Mac applications, but the kind of backend development required to build this sync system wasn’t unexplored territory — we knew this was something we could handle. Before we moved into Cocoa development, Black Pixel made a lot of money as a Rails shop and did server development for some very high-profile clients, including Getty Images. After talking with Manton Reece at NSConference a few years ago, I reached the conclusion that we should go ahead and do this ourselves.

As a company, we’ve implemented this kind of sync in the past. It’s a problem we’ve solved before and are far better equipped now than in the past.

A Targeted User Experience

This was an opportunity to offer an opinionated user experience. NetNewsWire 3 was one of many apps that had essentially become different takes on Google Reader clients (NNW 3 was certainly the best and most powerful). We wanted to do something different because we realized it could become better.

We knew we could offer improved, targeted performance if we controlled both sides of the sync equation. Instead of a generic service meant to meet a specific set of functions we may not even expose in the app, we were able to define a customized, optimized protocol to ensure the best possible performance we could provide our customers.

The obvious tradeoff here is interoperability (exchanging sync data with other apps that aren’t NetNewsWire). We’re shooting to make the best possible experience for the people that use NetNewsWire. Period.

This sync service is tailored solely for NetNewsWire users. Absolutely everything that gets transferred does so securely and concisely. And the only other people competing for the performance cycles of your sync server are other NetNewsWire users.

Since we control both sides of the system, we can offer support for features that go beyond RSS, such as syncing tabs, which give us the foundation for a great roadmap that we wouldn’t get anywhere else.

It’s Free

The sync service is free and intended to stay that way. One side effect of this is, if you’re using a trial version of NetNewsWire for the Mac, you won’t be able to set up syncing until you buy a copy. We may revisit this in the future, but at the present our focus is on shipping the iPad version of the app for our iOS users.

While we may offer paid subscriptions in the future for additional features, we’re very happy with sync as it stands today, and we have no intention of upending the current pricing model.

We Hope You Like It

A lot of hard work went into making this the very best sync service we could provide for our users, and we aim to keep improving on the platform we created. We love it, and we hope that you will too.