- Newsstand app for mac how to#
- Newsstand app for mac for mac os#
- Newsstand app for mac mac os#
- Newsstand app for mac software#
I’ve heard from users that Newsstand works on Mac OS 8.6. The Classic Apple community is a lot larger than I thought.ĭo you see yourself doing versions of Newsstand for earlier Mac OSes? Mac OS X? When I finished Newsstand though, I was proud of it and began sharing it. What kind of user did you have in mind for Newsstand? These barriers pushed me to think creatively and, in the end, I felt I had a good-looking app. I ended up creating all of the graphics in Mac OS 9 using Adobe Photoshop 4.0.1. Adobe Photoshop 2020 can open PICT files, but it can’t save them.
Mac apps can only display PICT files, not JPGs or GIFs. The last barrier I had to work through was the graphics. The Xojo programming forum is as close as I could get to user help, but they quickly became suspicious of what I was doing since Xojo has a lot of the properties built out that I needed.
Newsstand app for mac how to#
Some simple things, like figuring out how to get File > Close to actually close a window, took me longer to figure out than I’d like to admit (it’s just: self.close). I had to rely on the user guide and language reference to build the app. There weren’t forums where I could work through my technical obstacles. StackOverflow doesn’t exist for REALbasic. The second barrier I encountered was a lack of troubleshooting support. The end result of Newsstand though looks a lot more natural than an HTMLViewer anyway, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. On my web server, I wrote the PHP scripts to pull the RSS feeds and process them as XML feeds. I ended up using a TCP/IP socket connection in REALbasic to connect to my web server, and then I had to parse the XML into a format that was usable by Newsstand. I think that’s because Mac OS 9 doesn’t have WebKit like Mac OS X. But my first barrier was that I couldn’t use REALbasic’s HTMLViewer control to display HTML. When I started development on Newsstand, I thought I could take the general idea Action Retro had with 68k.news and render the Google News RSS feed as a web page in an app.
Newsstand app for mac software#
To make things even more difficult, I’ve never written any software in my life. What were some challenges you ran into in developing this app? By taking the news out of the browser, I was able to create an original classic Mac interface that feels at home in the Applications folder. Apps like REALbasic itself and MacAnalysis are some of my favorite examples. I’ve also been a fan of clean, Apple Platinum interfaces. eWorld’s Newsstand had multiple sections, so I added a little over 200 topics to explore in Newsstand. I wanted a classic app that felt like reading the news in eWorld back in 1995. eWorld’s news section was called Newsstand, which is where I got the name. The inspiration for creating a standalone app though came from Apple’s eWorld service. I love Action Retro’s 68k.news, and I’m a daily reader of Google News on my phone. What made you think that approach needed to have an app on OS 9? I saw you took inspiration from the 68k.news site (which I love). With Newsstand, I’ve used my PowerBooks more than my M1 MacBook Air over the last few weeks. The web is pretty limited on Mac OS 9, so I created Newsstand as a way to get a lot more use out of my Macs. While I love playing old games on my Macs, I wish I was able to do more with them.
I’m keeping an eye out for a Newton MessagePad and an eMate 300 to add to my collection too. I also have a few generations of iPods and decades of Apple posters and pamphlets. I have six classic Macs: a PowerBook G3 PDQ, a PowerBook G3 Pismo (which I use the most), an iMac G4, a PowerMac G4 Cube, a 12″ PowerBook G4, and a Mac Mini G4.
Newsstand app for mac for mac os#
I hadn’t played with those apps in decades, but quarantine and shelter in place allowed me to pick up this hobby again.ĭeveloping for Mac OS is (a) amazing and (b) anochronistic! How much of a classic Mac user are you?ĭeveloping for Mac OS 9 was a great experience, especially using an app like REALbasic, which is what I used to develop Newsstand. My first Mac was a Macintosh Performa 5215CD, and even as a kid I played around with pro-level software like Adobe Photoshop 4 and REALbasic. I’m in my 30s, and I’ve been an Apple fan since I was a kid. I’m Alex Robb, I live in Chicago, and I work for a tech company as an analyst. Tell us about yourself: Who are you, and what do you do? That’s my kind of project, so I reached out to the developer, Alex Robb, about how (and why!) he came up with his Google News reader, Newsstand. I saw an interesting post on Reddit this week: someone had developed an RSS reader for Mac OS 9.
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