The writing here is very nice. I wish my writing carried itself as well. Beyond the style and structure, the tone of the article is remarkable and lovely. Cynicism wrapped in love and hope and nostalgia.<p>Nice work.
It's nice to read a piece by someone who doesn't have a chip on his shoulder. So many times people leave employment bitter after a losing a hard-fought and divisive political battle. It says a lot about the author's character that he can calmly empathize with all of his colleagues, even through what were surely highly controversial and sensitive choices, like the decision to sell the author's application to a competitor.
"In late 2005 it acquired NetNewsWire and hired me."
"I shipped NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 on the Mac App Store, and a couple months later sold NetNewsWire to Black Pixel..."<p>How do you sell a product after it has been acquired by another company? Did he somehow retain independent ownership of the Lite version?
It's a good article.<p>I would love to read more background on the acquisitions of MarsEdit, NNW, and Glassboard. MarsEdit 3.0 was released in 2010 and since then has only seen minor updates. NNW is dead in the water on OS X and completely gone on iOS. And Glassboard is losing significant amounts of money while the author spends more time on blog posts and podcasts than adding features to the app (not to talk about all those crashes).
"In addition to straight RSS reading it had some kind of controls for making groups of people. An admin could say, for instance, that all developers are subscribed to these ten feeds, plus whatever else they might want."<p>I had a similar idea a few years ago but didn't think there was a market for it. RSS feeds don't use up a lot of bandwidth so you couldn't use that angle (even in a country like South Africa, where I lived at the time, where bandwidth was limited and expensive). I also couldn't picture a company wanting to spend money on something as non-critical as RSS feeds. I wonder how wrong I was?
I remember when NewsGator bought FeedDemon, my RSS reader of choice on Windows. I was a little nervous but it went ok, for a while anyway. FeedDemon came to end-of-like quite naturally I feel. RSS just sort of died off for me the same way I think it did for many others. I think the problem with RSS is the information overload and addiction to more information. It just all gets too much once you hit a certain number of feeds. Now I don't use RSS for anything, at least not knowingly.