My favorite and most-used piece of Mac software, NetNewsWire, released a new version this week. NetNewsWire (whose parent company is NewsGator) is probably the finest RSS software on the planet, with best-of-class apps on each platform. [As I alluded in a tweet](http://twitter.com/holman/status/4310201305), this both excites me terribly and implants the fear of change in me. It’s been a long time coming; the iPhone version has been rotting in AppStore approval hell for at least a month, and I’ve been holding off on new NNW for Mac betas until I could cross-sync over Google Reader onto my iPhone. I upgraded immediately.
It’s been a disappointment. I realize change is hard to deal with, so that was unsurprising, but as a technologist by profession I started wondering *why* I was having such a bad experience with it. What kind of lessons can we take from this? What has NewsGator done right, and what does the new version fall flat on?
I’m mostly miffed about the busted icon badging, but I think this is a good overview. Newsgator’s priorities are no longer consumer-facing applications and I think this shows through very clearly with the new NNW releases on iPhone and Mac.
