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Goodies: September 8, 2015

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 2 min read

Good morning! I hope you had a nice holiday weekend (non-US readers, I hope you had a lovely normal weekend). There's an Apple event this Wednesday where the company is expected to announce ALL THE THINGS. A new iPhone is certainly in my future, and the rumored iPad Pro could be exactly the portable computer I've been waiting for. My wife and I are using a 2nd generation Apple TV (still 720p) and are each eagerly looking forward to seeing what they have in store for that little black box.

It will be all Apple talk all the time after that, so enjoy yourself now with this excellent video by Andrew Huang who covered The Weeknd's excellent hit Can't Feel My Face using things found in a dentist's office.

New Game Releases

  • Destiny: The Taken King Expansion (PS4/XBO/PS3/360)
  • Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)
  • Super Mario Maker (Wii U, Friday)

Links of Note:

  • Apple and the TV Market - The Rajam Repot
  • Should Twitter lose the 140-character limit or would that be suicide? - Fortune
  • Summer Box Office: How Movie Tracking Went Off the Rails - The Hollywood Reporter
  • Who is NetNewsWire 4? - Waffle
  • Android Wear on iOS: A hobbled, Google-centric smartwatch experience - ArsTechnica
  • A Blind Spot That 85 Million People Can See - M.G. Siegler
  • Leaving Apple - G. Keenan Schneider
  • An iPhone Lover's Review of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge - yours truly
  • How I learned to step back and give my team real power - Fast Company
  • Apple's September 9 event rumor roundup (aka: Mark Gurman ruins all the surprises) - 9to5Mac
  • Sphero BB-8 Review: This Is the Coolest Star Wars Toy Ever - Toyland

Swag of the Week

NetNewsWire 4 was released last week and I have been enjoying it quite a bit. I am regularly a Feedbin/Reeder user and I was pretty happy with that combo, but Black Pixel makes great apps and I had to check it out.

I do have a couple caveats to consider when thinking about buying NetNewWire. One, this is a very "traditional" RSS reader. It's designed to show you all your subscribed articles quickly and with little distraction. Don't expect any fancy "magazine style" layouts or smart filtering of content. Second, while this app does sync, it uses it's own syncing service. This means that you are limited to what platforms NetNewsWire is available for. Currently there are only Mac and iPhone apps. iPad, Android, and Windows users are out of luck.

Even with these considerations, I think NetNewsWire is a very good app that won't appeal to everyone, but if you're the sort of person who likes that old school RSS reading experience, I think you'll like this very much.

NetNewsWire 4 is available for Mac ($10) and iPhone ($4). The syncing service is free.