Brent Simmons

Brent Simmons is a long-time Mac and iOS developer based in Seattle, best known as the creator of NetNewsWire, one of the earliest and most influential RSS readers on the Mac. He has been releasing software since the mid-1990s and worked on UserLand Frontier before founding Ranchero Software with Sheila Simmons.

Ranchero introduced NetNewsWire in 2002 as a Cocoa RSS reader for Mac OS X, and in 2004 released MarsEdit, a blog editor that grew out of NetNewsWire's weblog features. NetNewsWire was sold to NewsGator in 2005, where Simmons continued to work on it; MarsEdit was later acquired by Daniel Jalkut's Red Sweater Software in 2007, and NetNewsWire moved to Black Pixel in 2011.

He later worked on Glassboard at Sepia Labs, co-created the note-taking app Vesper with John Gruber and Dave Wiskus at Q Branch, worked at The Omni Group on OmniOutliner and OmniFocus from 2014 to 2020, and then on the Audible iOS app. In 2018 he regained the NetNewsWire name and relaunched his open-source reader Evergreen as NetNewsWire 5, now a free, MIT-licensed app for Mac and iOS developed in the open. He writes about software and the open web on his long-running blog, inessential.