The name Brent Simmons has been joined with famed Mac (and now iOS) RSS app NetNewsWire for so long, it's hard to imagine them being put asunder. That's exactly what's happening, though: Simmons has announced that NetNewsWire has been sold to Black Pixel, and that he won't be going with it. Instead, Simmons will move onto other projects after nine years spent working on the RSS client.

NetNewsWire started out as Simmons' pet project under his company, Ranchero Software, back in 2002. At the time, RSS was just barely beginning to make its way into nerd culture (some would argue that it's still working its way through) and NetNewsWire on Mac OS X was one of the first desktop RSS apps on any platform.

Eventually, Brent and his wife Sheila sold the company to NewsGator, who incorporated NetNewsWire into its other RSS offerings. Since then, NewsGator has experimented a bit with NetNewsWire's business model, attempting free versions, ad-supported versions, and now iOS versions of the app. NetNewsWire has consistently won the hearts of Ars Technica staffers for years, not to mention those of the general Mac community.

According to Simmons, the sale to Black Pixel was his suggestion, not NewsGator's. "It was my idea, my initiative, and I found the right home for it," Simmons told Ars. "I couldn't be more excited—Black Pixel is going to rock at it."

In an exclusive interview with Daring Fireball, Simmons said the decision stemmed from his own limits when it came to updating multiple versions of the app and keeping it high quality:

I started thinking about this a couple weeks after NetNewsWire Lite appeared on the Mac App Store. Having released the first of the new shared-code apps, and this release having met with some modest appreciation, I was feeling pretty good. But then I started to think about how long it would take to get all versions using the new shared code, and then, more importantly, about how long it would take to make them really, really awesome, which was yet another step. At first I just thought of killing off the iPad and iPhone versions, since I figured I could handle the Mac version myself. That was a selfish idea, not in the best interests of users or the software. (Everybody has thoughts not worthy of them. Me too.) It was, at least, an honest recognition of my own limits, though, and that was what led me, haltingly at first, against my own inner resistance, to consider selling NetNewsWire. I went back and forth on it in my mind, and I kept taking my own temperature on it. I finally admitted to myself that I was hot to find it a new home.

As for what Simmons is doing next, he won't say just yet. "After nine years of work on NetNewsWire, I think it's time to let it make its way in the world with new friends and a bigger team," Simmons told Ars. We're told to expect an announcement soon, though. And don't worry; we have some face time scheduled with Simmons for WWDC week in order to get more details on what's on his plate for the future.