NetNewsWire’s theme support is one of my favorite features and IMHO is extremely underutilized relative to how much it can improve user experience. So I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve been working on to help folks discover and create their own themes:
- The NetNewsWire Theme Marketplace - This site highlights all of the themes I could find on GitHub and includes preview thumbnails, download counts, install links, etc etc. It updates automatically to include new themes as they show up on GitHub; see the site for full details but it basically boils down to tagging your repo with
netnewswire-themeand you’ll show up on the list. Also includes an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in NNW to play around with new themes easily. - A starter theme template with some tooling to make it easy to create high quality themes that work across macOS/iOS/iPadOS and a variety of different article types. It also takes all the work out of hosting your theme on GitHub with automated releases, screenshots, and the like.
The theme template works great if you’re doing your theme by hand, but it also makes it dead simple for your coding agent of choice to create a theme for you. It’s a bit of fun… this prompt will do it:
Help me make a NetNewsWire theme with dave-atx/netnewswire-theme-template. Guide me through setup and design. I want [describe the look or reading experience].
(I wasted an hour the other day trying out some of the styles mentioned in this “not all AI poster designs need to be horrible” article I came across the other day)
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. Or better yet, go create a couple of cool themes! 