Vienna RSS

Celebrating 20 Years of Vienna RSS

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nine months ago, I noticed that the first public build of Vienna was published on Sourceforge on July 7th of 2005. Promising to myself to collect memories and post a blog post, I added a reminder for today, expecting that, as I would be retired from my banking job, I would be more available to do that.

I am effectively retired now, but time is still flying, so I was in a hurry this week-end. But a promise is a promise: let’s celebrate!

From Aqua…

My long time accomplice Josh has almost always good advices when he reviews either my code or my ideas. In an email he sent me on Saturday, he wondered if it would be worth creating a virtual machine and taking screenshots of the v1.0.

Here we go, thanks to archive.org! After some minor fiddling, I got the initial version of Vienna running on VirtualBox on my retro hack. But making it connect to today’s World Wide Web and adding at least a feed to Vienna turned challenging. Most websites require Transport Layer Security 1.2 or better now, and even after installing the updated certificates, I could not make any https connection work from Mac OS X Tiger.

But thanks to Protoweb and proxy settings, I was able to get a retro version of BBC’s feed!

The toolbar position feels a bit strange, but all other things feel immediately natural and familiar…

I was quick to adapt the settings to me liking: just a few seconds to note that, in the “View” menu, instead of “Layout > Vertical”, I had to choose “Reading Pane > On The Right”.

The first comment on Macupdate was published five days after the download was made available, and was:

I’ve been using Vienna for a few days now, and I have to say it’s the only client that comes the closest to being between NewsFire (my preferred GUI) and NetNewsWire Lite (my preferred feature set). Pluses: - Growl support - Fully customizable three-pane view - Smart folders - Flagged items - Open source and gratis Bugs: - No way to set an expiration date for headlines. They just keep accumulating, though there is a “Compact Database” option - Date sorting isn’t always accurate - Takes extra clicks to mark messages read - Some feed [fav]icons displayed incorrectly What I’d like to see: - Podcast support - A bit more deafult spacing between feeds or alternating lines – very cramped at the moment - Abitlity to open links in background - Bonjour support - Pool of included feeds (like NNWL) - More options and customization for individual feeds - More view styles - A better icon. That wavy V is fugly All in all, it’s a great start. As an experiment of sorts, I removed NNWL from my dock when I installed Vienna and haven’t returned to NNWL since.

The 2025 user I am would add: no integrated browser! It was added in September 2005, in version 2.0.0.2007

… To Liquid Glass

Let’s stay above liquid elements, and let’s swim from Aqua to Liquid Glass. This is how Vienna looks like when compiled and run on the developer preview of macOS Tahoe:

But was there a Vienna 1 ?

All right, that was fine. But a mystery remained: why was the application named Vienna 2? Was there a Vienna 1, and if so, could July 7th 2005 still be considered as the official birthday of Vienna RSS?

I found the answer in the help files, which seemed familiar…

… but contained some informations which differed from what we are used to.

This led me to the archives of the opencommunity.co.uk website provided the answer : Vienna 1 was an offline message reader for the CIX conferencing service.

A new visit to Sourceforge and an installation confirmed that while Vienna for CIX and Vienna RSS shared some technical components, the goal of the former was really different.

Under the hood

Github summarizes 20 years of involvement with the following graph:

It’s misleading. Changes in years 2011-2012 appear inflated, due to difficulties caused by migration from Subversion to Git of a code repository which was initially inited in CVS.

And even in what appears as a relatively calm period, the maintainers are busy, especially on week-ends… Cf. last 12 months:

Who contributed ?

Many people. I am particularly sorry being unable to give information on translators, but we can list number of commits by author, ignoring merge commits.

% git shortlog -sn --no-merges
Barijaona Ramaholimihaso
Eitot
stevewpalmer
johnson1234
mstroeck
Tassilo Karge
Josh
Joshua Pore
evands
dak180
Echelon9
Jeff Johnson
Nick Dazé
Salvatore Ansani
curtis-faith
mteodori
Jan Weiß
György Tóth
dkocher
Barijaona Ramholimihaso
Boris Dušek
nielspl
Andrew Herron
leitinha
Adam Hartford
Sveinbjorn Thordarson
biphuhn
Dmitry Wolf
Konstruktionist
Matt Reagan
Miguel Araújo
ansani
n
renefk05
Bavarious
Jakub Stasiak
Jean-Francois Moy
Jesse Claven
Josh Ringer
Kang-min Liu
Marco Zehe
Adriano Marcondes Machado
Ahmed Badran
Andrew Hyatt
Daniel Aleksandersen
Daniel Cotton
Devin Coughlin
Emiliano Necciari
Gerrit Beine
Hiroaki ENDOH
Making GitHub Delicious.
Michael G. Ströck
Neil Tiffin
Nicolas Lœuillet
Pete Cooper
ReadmeCritic
Rei Vilo
Rinat
Torsten Landsiedel
William Bowling
bavarious
jfml
no_author
rj-p
root
カワリミ人形 

Some people appear under multiple names, and weight and complexity of different commits cannot be assessed arithmetically, but I chose to outline the role of a few people.

Steve Palmer

Initial icons of Vienna for CIX and Vienna RSS

Founding father of Vienna, Steve contributed mostly from 2004 to 2008, made a short comeback in 2010, and is definitely at the root of Vienna’s ethics: making a clean, spartan, and highly useful app.

He almost never publicized his bio, but I finally found an “About me” (he was from the UK and a software developer working in the US for Microsoft Business Solutions), and some reflexions on writing software : part 2 and part 1.

In September 2005, Vienna got a new icon by Jasper Hauser.

Jeff Johnson

I could contact him thanks to his Mastodon account @lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social:

I give all credit to Steve Palmer, the creator of Vienna, who I believe started working on it in January 2004. Vienna was a model Mac app project, and I learned a lot from Steve’s source code.

I became a Vienna user in 2005 and continue to use it 20 years later. I had tried the various RSS readers available at the time and found Vienna best fit my requirements and workflow, which is still true. I’ve never seen anything better.

I submitted my first source code patch to the Vienna project in February 2006. I was just learning Mac development, so Vienna was how I cut my teeth. For a while, before I got my first paying job as a developer, I was working on Vienna full time. Vienna actually helped me to get my first job, because my boss was also a user!

In late 2006, Steve announced that he was stepping back from Vienna development, and I became the main developer.

I worked on Vienna until 2010, when I announced my retirement from the project. I just didn’t have time to devote to it anymore.

Michael G. Ströck

Michael started his contributions in December 2006, with at first a focus on localization. He had for a time the crucial responsability of being the guardian of the temple. He moved the development from Sourceforge to Github: without him, the project would probably have died.

Barijaona Ramaholimihaso

Mac user since 1986, I don’t remember when I first encountered Vienna. After reading the french edition of an online course titled Become an Xcoder, I took in 2012 a new year resolution: learning more by working on a real project.

My first satisfaction was achieving the transition to universal builds : at that time, that meant having the application run natively on both PowerPC, Intel 32 bits and Intel 64 bits.

As I was far from being confident with Apple’s tools, dak180 was key in starting reorganizing the on disk layout and fixing the release process.

While I was finishing the Google Reader support started by Adam Hartford and Salvatore Ansani, Google announced it would end Google Reader… That is far from being the single reason why Vienna 3 had 20 beta versions and 9 release candidate versions before being released in November 2014!

A new icon authored by a forum user named @romiq and Nick Dazé was introduced in 2013

Josh

Joshua Pore started contributing in 2014. He was key in structuring our methodologies and remaking the website. Most importantly to me, he helped me defeat my reluctance to refactor things and to delve into Interface Builder!

He remains active, but somewhat regrets the good old times when Apple was focusing on AppKit and Objective-C.

Eitot

Eitot began contributing in 2017. He was the first to introduce Swift in our codebase, and is the main force behind current refactoring decisions. But he is also very attentive to details. He added the support for JSON Feed.

Tassilo Karge

Tassilo began contributing in 2018. He is the main force behind the transition from old school WebView to WKWebView and the improvements to smart folders.

What’s next?

Stay tuned! You can participate in discussions like this one.

You can also follow me in Vienna, via this RSS feed (which is not solely dedicated to Vienna).

If you have an account on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed, …), you can react to this article by answering to this toot.

Goodbye to cocoaforge.com and the Vienna forums

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately the main support forums at forums.cocoaforge.com are down and unlikely to be revived. This is the end of an era for cocoaforge.com which had been the home for popular indie mac apps for around 20 years.

Vienna is transitioning to a new support process where the Vienna GitHub project is the primary place for users to seek support. We are evaluating other options and would love to hear any suggestions you may have.

Vienna 3.5.6 improves syncing support

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a long time, but Vienna 3.5.6 is finally out.

The app is now notarised, so it will be much easier to install Vienna under macOS Catalina (10.15).

This version is also important if you intent to use Inoreader.com for syncing between the different devices you use to read feeds. We had problems with Inoreader which has put in place severe limitations of its services. In fact, Inoreader almost entirely blocked the use of Vienna on its servers.

Of course, you could still use TheOldReader.com, Bazqux.com, FeedHQ.org or any FreshRSS server as an alternative. But we disliked the situation.

Thankfully, we have been able to improve it with two changes.

First, through the use of new algorithms, Vienna 3.5.6 is able to significantly reduce the network traffic between your Mac and any OpenReader server, including Inoreader. The gain is particularly noticeable if you privilege the actions present in the ‘Folder’ menu for marking articles read, rather than the actions present in the ‘Article’ menu.

For the time being, we recommend not to use the “Mark current article read after a short delay” setting in Preferences, if you are syncing with Inoreader. This could lead to a quick exhaustion of the daily quota of actions that Inoreader allocates to our app.

Instead, set “Mark current article read after “Next Unread” command” in the Preferences. Then, mainly use the “Mark All Articles as Read” or “Skip Folder” commands for updating your reading progression.

Another important change is that each Vienna user is now able to get his/her personal quota to be used with Inoreader, instead of using the very limited quota which has been assigned to us developers.

To do so, go with a web browser to the https://www.inoreader.com/all_articles#preferences-developer section of your Inoreader account. Choose “New application”, then select “Vienna” (or whatever you like) for application name, “OS X” for platform. You can leave other values unchanged and validate.

Note the values App ID: and App key: which have been assigned to the newly created application.

You can then fire a Terminal session and type the two following commands :

defaults write uk.co.opencommunity.vienna2 SyncingAppId <App ID:>

and :

defaults write uk.co.opencommunity.vienna2 SyncingAppKey <App key:>

(Replace the quoted parts with the aforementioned values)

You can monitor your use of daily quotas by going back to the https://www.inoreader.com/all_articles#preferences-developer section of your Inoreader account.

Vienna syncs with FreshRSS

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Since Vienna 3, which introduced the ability to sync with a cloud based aggregator (à la Google Reader), Vienna developers team got requests to add support for many open source applications : Tiny RSS / Newsblur / ownCloud News…

Unfortunately, due to limited time, we were unable to satisfy these requests. We could only point to FeedHQ as a possible alternative for people wanting to have their own sync server. But FeedHQ’s technical requirements are slightly higher than what is most commonly provided by hosting companies.

I am therefore very happy to announce Vienna’s compatibility with FreshRSS (version 1.13.0 and later).

FreshRSS is a free, self-hostable aggregator which just requires PHP/MySQL.

Special thanks to Alexandre Lapetite for his cooperation, and to Bish Erbas for testing.

Vienna 3.5 is out

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Vienna 3.5 is out. It improves on many things, but the most visible feature is the support of macOS Mojave (10.14) ‘s dark mode appearance.

This version will probably be the latest to run on OS X Mavericks (10.9). We need to go forward to include some much needed improvements.

By the way, since the release of version 3.0 about 4 years ago, Vienna’s codebase has received on average 1.12 commit per day.

We hope you enjoy reading your feeds on Vienna!

Vienna 3.2.0 is out; many other to come

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Vienna 3.2.0 is available in the different download sections (at Github, SourceForge and Bintray). I would like to especially thank Eitot and Joshua Pore for their tremendous contributions to this version.

A modernized code base

Some current users might be annoyed by Vienna 3.2’s requirement for OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or a more recent version.

The development team didn’t take lightly this decision, as we don’t like leaving any user behind.

Vienna has been there for 14 years now. This accumulation of experience is an asset, but in some areas it is also a liability: parts of the code are difficult to read and/or need modernization. Mavericks functionalities are seen by the current development team as the minimum base which will allow us to cleanup the code and start some much needed improvements, while keeping up with Apple’s own changes toward a more modern macOS.

Let’s just give an example : older versions of Vienna required use of Xcode for localizations, and the translation process was cumbersome and error prone. Now, thanks to Crowdin, it’s much easier for any user to contribute to improve Vienna’s translation in the language they use.

We hope we can fasten the development cycle of Vienna

We, as a development team, learned many things through working together from remote corners of the planet.

Unfortunately, the core of the team comprises only three persons (Josh, Eitot and myself) and none of us is in a position allowing him to work full time on Vienna. But we are convinced that, through a new organization, we will be able to deliver more frequently some new versions of Vienna, while maintaining a good level of quality.

We hope you will support us by testing our future beta versions.

Vienna 3.2.0 Beta is out now!

Sat, 16 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Those who are adventurous can try it out Vienna 3.2.0 Beta 1 now.

A list of what’s new can be found over at the GitHub release page.

Vienna 3.1.11 has been released!

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Vienna 3.1.11 has been released. It contains minor bug fixes and supports macOS 10.8 and above.

Download Vienna 3.1.11 now

Vienna website update and version 3.1.9 released

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to the first bit of news for Vienna in 2017.

Firstly, we have changed our main website URL to www.vienna-rss.com. Please change any bookmarks you may have as we are no longer using the .org URL. We are working on a new website design which we hope to have ready within the next month.

Vienna 3.1.9 has also been released – this is a minor release but it fixes some important bugs. It will also upgrade your Vienna database to make sure it contains the new Vienna website URL. Please note, 3.1.9 is the last main version that will work on Mac OS X 10.8. Only simple bug-fixes will be made available for 10.8 users going forward.

The next main version of Vienna will be 3.2.0 and will require Mac OS X 10.9 and above.

Stay tuned!

Vienna 3.1.8 released

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This release of Vienna is a recommended update that includes and important security fix and some bug fixes:

Fixed an External XML Entity (XXE) vulnerability which could allow malicious servers to read private files on the machine running Vienna
Fix incorrect escaping of OPML export
Fix font preferences not working
Fix error on unread articles count with OpenReader feeds
Fix articles’ list during feed refreshes when the current selection is a smart or group folder

Download Vienna 3.1.8 now!