NewsFire

» see newsfirerss.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

"NewsFire. Mac RSS with Style." That was the headline on the download page in 2005, under a flame icon sitting in a black glass disc, and the pitch underneath asked whether you were still clicking refresh on your favorite news sites by hand. In 2005 a lot of people were. RSS was the answer the web had arrived at for that problem and NewsFire was the answer a certain kind of Mac owner had arrived at for RSS: a dark window built by someone who cared more about how it looked than about how many formats it could import.

That someone was David Watanabe, working alone. He also wrote Acquisition, a Gnutella client that looked considerably better than the network behind it deserved, and Inquisitor, the search box replacement for Safari that Yahoo bought in May 2008. A BitTorrent client called Xtorrent came along as well. He stayed independent after the Yahoo deal, consulting rather than joining, and kept four products going from one desk, which was a normal shape for a Mac developer in that decade and an exhausting one.

A Mac in Turkey in 2005 was an imported object with a price to match, sitting in design studios and almost nowhere else. I was on Windows on a TTNet line, reading feeds in whatever was free, and $18.99 in dollars for a news reader was not a transaction available to me even in principle. NewsFire belonged to a software economy with its own currency and its own small famous names, and I could read about it long before I could have run it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the price of the thing ~

Version 1.0 cost $18.99 for a single user and needed Mac OS X 10.3. On 1 March 2008 Watanabe made it freeware, and version 1.6 became the last build anybody could download without paying. Then on 3 February 2011 NewsFire 2.0 arrived in the newly opened Mac App Store with a price on it again.

Nothing followed version 2.0. No compatibility fix and no note explaining the silence. The app stopped moving in February 2011 while remaining for sale, which is a particular kind of abandonment: the store page keeps taking money and the developer has already left the building.

~ the download button ~

The website carried on long after the software stopped. newsfirerss.com served the same black page with the same download arrow through the whole of the 2010s and into the 2020s, and the last capture of it answering for itself is 6 May 2022. Three days later the address began redirecting to newsfirex.com, the developer's own domain, and NewsFire stopped being a place you could go. Today neither hostname resolves. The Wikipedia article records that as of July 2025 the app could not be found in the Mac App Store and the download link was broken.

~ the apps that followed ~

The event that reorganized every feed reader on earth was Google Reader, which took the syncing job away from the desktop in 2005 and then handed it back without warning when it closed in July 2013. Readers that still had a maintainer in 2013 inherited a wave of people who suddenly needed somewhere to put their OPML file. NetNewsWire survived that way and is still being worked on today, after changing hands more than once and being rewritten from scratch.

NewsFire had been unmaintained for two years by the time that wave arrived, so it collected none of it. The app that might have been the obvious Mac destination in the summer of 2013 was already a page with a download button and nobody behind it, which is why its ending has no date anyone announced, only the day the hosting stopped.

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