Dave Watanabe Is An Idiot

Apple

I’m revoking my previous statement about how wonderful and cool NewsFire is.

As it turns out, NewsFire’s developer, Dave Watanabe, has decided to start charging $20 for it. My problems with this are many:

  • NewsFire really isn’t worth $20. It’s an RSS reader. My toilet has an RSS reader, these days. It might be worth $5.
    • There was never any indication that NewsFire was going to be shareware. There was just a prompt to upgrade, and a minor mention of a “registration” system in the release notes.
      • There’s no real improvement over the existing, working 0.62 version.
        • NetNewsWire Lite does the same thing, and is free. I’m not sure which drugs Mr. Watanabe is on. Gone are the days where a developer can give a marginally-better-than-the-competition application away for free, then arbitrarily decide to start charging for the next version. Particularly when Tiger’s version of Safari will support RSS feeds natively within a few months.