Newsstand is the Google News RSS reader Mac OS 9 users have been waiting for

News
By
published
Newsstand Screenshots
Newsstand Screenshots (Image credit: Alex Robb)

What you need to know

  • Someone created a Google News RSS reader app for Mac OS 9.
  • Even the app's website was created in Mac OS 9.

Someone created a great new app for reading Google News RSS feeds, called Newsstand. It even has a gorgeous 3D icon. Oh, and it only runs on Mac OS 9.

Yes, you read that right. And only macOS 9 at that – nothing newer.

I saw Newsstand fly through my Twitter feed yesterday and didn't think much of it. But then it made an appearance on Daring Fireball and I thought I should take a closer look – and boy am I glad I did.

Built by Alex Robb, entirely on a Mac OS 9 machine, the app's website is perfect. It obviously plays host to the Newsstand downloadable, but it's just all so very simple. No moving images, no scrolling through floating text – static text and images on a page. Beautiful.

So why create a Google News RSS reader that can only run on Mac OS 9?

I created Newsstand as a fun way to access the news on my vintage Macs. I have two Apple PowerBook G3 computers, but older machines don't work very well on the modern web. Their browsers can't load https websites, and vintage hardware can't keep up with the dynamic pages that make up the web today. I created Newsstand in Mac OS 9 using tools only available at the time.With Newsstand, I can use a Classic Mac application on my PowerBooks and stay up-to-date with what's happening. Newsstand has been a personal project over the last few weeks and a really fun challenge. I'm ready to release it to all of you, and I'm eager to hear your feedback.

You can of course download Newsstand yourself and it's absolutely free. You'll need 12MB of RAM and 2.2MB of hard disk space on top of the Mac OS 9 thing.

As great as Mac OS 9 is, sometimes we need something a little more modern. The current M1 MacBook Air is the best MacBook for most people and it'll run macOS Monterey later this year, too!

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.