I’m not sure how to blame the Fenty administration for this (yet), so it gets its own post — a pathetic attempt to attract, via Google Alerts, the attention that my email to support@ hasn’t.
So: RANCHERO SOFTWARE’S NET NEWS WIRE is a piece of junk. I paid for this application a year ago. Along with it came a year’s worth of their NewsGator service, an RSS-synching feature that I had no use for. That NewsGator trial expired on Saturday — and my copy of NNW suddenly decided it, too, was no longer interested in working. It now thinks it’s expired shareware, and asserts this fact in a maximally-annoying way: by disabling manual feed refreshes and the “next unread” buttons. There are probably other even-more-insidious limitations that I haven’t yet found. I’m scared to look.
I know, I know: use Vienna, use Fire, use Google Reader. The truth is that I like NNW’s interface a lot. And hey, I’ve already paid for it. Or I thought I did, anyway.
A-HA!: “Mark all as read” also doesn’t work. Fantastic. And it turns out I could’ve upgraded to version 3.0 for free as late as Friday (when my NewsGator subscription ran out) — maybe my failure to get the latest & greatest is what’s responsible for the current malfunction.
Ranchero eventually wrote back and confirmed that I was experiencing a bug, not an unusually evil licensing policy. They’ve made everything better, and I’m once more a happy customer — see here for more.