NetNewsWire Lite (NNW) introduced me to the wonderful world of RSS (XML) feeds some time ago. RSS-enabled websites and an excellent aggregator like NNW make an info-junky’s wet dreams come true. RSS is crack to HTML’s cocaine.

After using NNW Lite for a long, long time I’m thinking of upgrading to the Pro version and using it’s Weblog Editor to post to this site. To make the editor useful for me I wrote a little applescript that uploads a post to my website when I save it (via NNW’s ‘post’ command) to a specific folder on my hard drive.

But when I downloaded the Pro version I couldn’t use it. The demo had expired. Darn. I must have demo’d the Pro version long ago and forgotten about it. What is an aspiring geek to do? Attempt a hack of course.

But listen up first! Ranchero, the makers of NetNewsWire Pro, seem to be extremely cool Mac OS X developers so don’t use this tip to rip them off! Use this tip only if you’re seriously considering an upgrade and find yourself with an expired demo. It would be extremely UNCOOL to steal from small Mac developers putting out great software like NNW.

And now to the little hack:

It’s ridiculously easy to get the demo working again. This tip is for Panther users and you need to have Xcode installed too. Go to your ~/Library/Preferences folder and find this file: com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist (ah yes, the .plist, where all good mac hacks start ;-)

Xcode comes with a little app called the Property List Editor. If you double-click NNW’s .plist file it will open in that app. Next, click the arrow next to “Root”, scoll down to the entry “FirstRun” and double-click on it’s value so it’s editable and change it to something that isn’t more than 30 days ago, like today. And that’s it, NNW Pro should work fine for the next 30 days.

Of course .plist files are simply XML files that can be edited in any text editor so you don’t NEED the Property List Editor, its just a tad easier. permanent link to this post