Doug Mejia

As I’ve mentioned before, NetNewsWire has been my favorite RSS reader. They’ve had a small hiccup with their recent update, but it was not a huge deal. Regarding accessibility, it no longer recognizes my three-finger swipe to move to the next article. I found a workaround by tapping and holding with one finger, then swiping. This fixes the problem for me, though it’s not as fluid as the three-finger swipe I was used to.

My bigger issue with NetNewsWire was iCloud syncing. On my phone, it worked perfectly since I use it daily. However, on my iPad, where I only check occasionally, it never synchronized smoothly. It took forever, and for a while, it wouldn’t sync at all. At one point, it showed the last sync was three months ago. I deleted the iCloud-related feeds, deactivated the account, and rebuilt everything from scratch. It claimed to sync afterward, but no new articles appeared in the feeds.

Frustrated, I searched for alternative RSS readers but found none that fit my accessibility needs with text-to-speech. At least, none I preferred over NetNewsWire.

Then I saw someone mention Feedbin, a complete RSS service with its own app. I’m trying it out with their 30-day free trial. So far, the synchronization is spot-on. I still prefer NetNewsWire’s interface over the Feedbin app, but I haven’t had any sync issues across my devices. It’s incredibly fast too.

Feedbin has become my new source of truth, via NetNewsWire. I imported my feeds using an OPML file exported from NetNewsWire. Once I brought everything into the system, it just worked. Now, it does cost $5 per month or $50 per year, but if it works for me, I’m happy to pay. I’m a firm believer in paying for tools that help you get things done while supporting the developers who create them. Free options always worry me because I never know how long they’ll last.

Beyond speed and ease of use, Feedbin offers a perk that iCloud and NetNewsWire alone don’t: a unique email address for newsletter subscriptions. This brings newsletters directly into my RSS feed, so I can read them alongside my other news sources throughout the day. Pretty neat.

Since I already had a newsletter email set up, I created a rule that automatically forwards anything sent to that address to my unique Feedbin email, then deletes it from my email client. Everything happens in the background—I never see newsletters in my inbox, but they appear in my RSS feed. It’s great all around.

I’m still on the 30-day trial, but I’ve already entered my payment information. Unless I find a showstopper, I’ll be subscribing to Feedbin as soon as the trial expires.

One of the features I’m enjoying on the new Digg is Digg Daily. It’s essentially an AI-generated summary of the latest posts, news, and comments being shared and discussed on the platform. Not only does it tell you what each article is about, but it also highlights the comments users are posting. All of this is delivered in audio format between two AI hosts.

If you’ve used Google’s NotebookLM and had it create an audio digest, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s basically a male and female AI-generated voice giving you the highlights of what’s trending on Digg at the moment. It’s pretty shallow, but it’s meant to be just that: a quick audio podcast of sorts to catch you up on the latest happenings on Digg. I like it, and I think it’s pretty cool.

I tried it this morning, and then I tried it again later in the evening, and it was the same content. So it really is a daily digest. It’s not updated throughout the day like some other services might be.

Years ago, I was an avid Digg user. Then it went away. After people learned to game the system, it became garbage for all practical purposes. I’m glad to say I finally got an invite to end the wait.

I signed up for the new Digg service yesterday. It’s still in beta (a closed beta at that), but it has a more modern and polished feel to the UI. The community seems to be picking up where it left off years ago. I have high hopes for it. I signed up right away and posted my obligatory “Hello world!” first post yesterday.

From the quick look I’ve had so far, it seems people are happy to be back, and they like the design because it’s nice and clean. I’ve seen two concerns emerge so far.

First, how is Digg going to verify that you’re 18 years or older? Right now, it’s just a button you click that says you are, in fact, 18 years or older. There’s no actual verification. The other concern is the infusion of AI into the system. Some people are wary, and others just plain don’t like it at all.

Let’s see how it evolves. It’s early days still, and they admit it. They want feedback, and they want people to “pick up a shovel and start building this thing.”

Of all the RSS reader apps I’ve tried on my iPhone and iPad, I love NetNewsWire the most. It’s been the most accessible option for me since I use VoiceOver to have it read article titles and content aloud. Then version 6.2 came out.

The update includes a whole list of improvements in the changelog, which sound great. The most popular addition seems to be Markdown support in RSS feeds. I don’t know why people are so excited about this feature, but it’s there. I’ll probably look into it more later.

However, in the meantime, the update has broken the app for me in some ways. I can still tap on something to hear the article title, and I can have it read the entire article once I double-tap to open it. But here’s the problem: I used to swipe three fingers from right to left on the screen to move to the next article. In this version, that gesture doesn’t work anymore.

Now I have to tap this tiny “next article” arrow in the top-right corner of the screen. It’s a really small target for me to hit, which delays the process and makes reading less comfortable. I hope the next update (hopefully coming very soon) will restore the three-finger swipe gesture for navigating to the following article.