(Update: NetNewsWire has now been released for free. While I still prefer NewsFire’s interface, NetNewsWire is now hard to overlook. See this post for more information.)
Ever since becoming addicted to the wonderful world of rss I have been looking for a rss reader that really suited my needs. I must admit that it took me a while to even catch on to the rss rage. Readers like Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and the built-in reader in Safari really did not work for me since I usually don’t want to read every thing on a feed and there is no way of knowing which articles I had read and which I had not on a quick glance. In fact I thought these readers were so annoying that I discounted the use of rss altogether. It wasn’t until recently when I started trying different clients that I really began to enjoy rss.
Since I am primarily an open source type of guy, I really was not interested in spending the money to buy a rss client. I also wanted a real desktop application, rather than an online news reader. My options for the mac were thus Vienna, and RSSOwl (written in Java). Due to my severe allergy to slow Java apps, I started out with Vienna. Compared to Live Bookmarks this was the Holy Grail. I started subscribing to a bunch of rss feeds and became a regular rss addict. Unfortunately Vienna really had issues with my style. I found myself having a difficult time keeping up with channels with a lot of activity.
I wanted to be able to subscribe to a lot of channels and then to quickly browse through new stories, marking those I did not want to read as “read” as I went along. Unfortunately Vienna had no option to mark and article as “read” directly after opening it. Instead I had to wait for a period of time before moving along to allow the article to be marked as “read.” This became really annoying. So much so that I would end up not pay attention to a feed for several days and then have 1000+ articles to sift through. In fact, I usually ended up either deleting those feeds feeds altogether or marking everything as read with a vow to try to keep up with the news better the next time around.
When I upgraded to Leopard, Vienna’s gui had some major issues. It wasn’t that it was non-functional, but it just looked bad. Scroll bars are half off the window space and the toolkit does not look right. And being that Leopard has been out for a while now, it seems that the gui problems are going to be around for a while. (Update: I’m glad to announce that the Vienna gui problems in Leopard have been fixed.) So I started looking around for other clients. Though this time, hooked to rss, I was willing to possible shell out a little if the client was good enough.
The two most popular Mac clients out there seem to be NetNewsWire and NewsFire. From a aesthetics perspective, NewsFire is the obvious favorite. NetNewsWire just looks too bubbly, kind of like Camino, to fit in on the Leopard desktop. (Update: Version 3.1 which is still in beta looks much better. It still doesn’t seem to match the beauty of NewsFire, but it does look better.)
I tried Apple’s mail client as well, which now has a rss reader built-in in Leopard. Though it was better than Vienna, it still fell way short of my goal.
NetNewsWire, despite not being that pleasing to look at has a lot of features. There is a free version which is mostly like a souped up version of Vienna and a payed version that has features coming out of its ears. In my opinion the most useful of NetNewsWire’s features is that it lets you sync between multiple computers and the free online news reader newsgator. It also has some nice features to help increase reading productivity-like several different reading layouts and the ability to hide feeds that have no new items in them. Yet NetNewsWire is still too email like for my tastes and when I tried out NewsFire it could not compare in simplicity or beauty.
NewsFire has a nice aesthetic to it. It nicely fits the Leopard desktop look and is not too busy or bubbly. But beauty is not its only selling point. From a day-to-day reading perspective NewsFire has some great features for quickly looking through massive amounts of unread articles. It does this by taking a different approach to rss from the traditional email style. It organizes all of the new articles in a brief column view that allows you to scan across the titles (including descriptions) of unread articles. If you find one you are interested in, you click it and the article titles and headers disappear leaving you only with the article to read. Then you can go back to the column view easily and continue perusing until you hit the end of the list. At this point, after reading all the new articles of interested, one may “mark all as read” and move on.
Both NewsFire and NetNewsWire have good built-in keyboard shortcuts that let you navigate articles and feeds with ease.
In the end, I choose NewsFire. NetNewsWire was a close second though due to its high level of features-especially the feature that lets you sync between multiple machines as well as their free online reader. Yet in the end NewsFire won because of Its few simple yet intuitive features that greatly increased my willingness to stay up to date on many feeds. The other newsreaders on OSX either did not offer the features I was looking for or did not offer the simplicity I desired.
If you are interested in getting started with rss, or simply looking for a better mac client and are willing to shell out a little dough-I highly recommend NewsFire. The $25 is truly a bargain for such a great app. http://www.newsfirerss.com If you are not quite sure about rss yet or want to stick with free apps, try out NetNewsWire Lite. Unfortunately the lite version is considerably out of date. Yet as of writing this article the beta version can be downloaded free here. Unlinke some beta software, NetNewsWire Lite 3.1b seemed quite stable and feature complete-at least enough to hold you over until the final 3.1 version is released.
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