dria.org

I’ve been a little unsatisfied with my current RSS Feed Reader of choice lately, so this morning, at boolean’s suggestion, I downloaded a copy of NetNewsWire. It’s really everything I ever imagined of having in an RSS feed reader, and more. Seriously.

Top of the list mind-blowing features:

• .mac synchronization ability, including subscriptions and read status. This means I don’t have to do any complicated import/export calisthenics to get my subscriptions on my desktop into my laptop, and vice-versa. If I read something on my lappy, it will remain “read” on compy after I sync.
• Smart lists — I can create a smart list that will show me all articles, for example, that have “Mozilla” in the title from all my feeds. This is utterly brilliant.
• One-click feed subscription when using Safari to read the web. Up in the address bar, an “RSS” button will show up if the page has an available RSS feed (this is somewhat eccentric, mind). Clicking that button brings up NetNewsWire which prompts me to accept the subscription. This is so much easier than the weirdness I had to do before. I just wish this worked with Firefox.
• “Sites drawer” — minor feature, really, but a nice one. The NNW guys have compiled an extremely long list of categorized feeds that you can subscribe to without having to go find them yourself. I’ve now subbed to more feeds than ever before, including several of which I’d not previously been aware.

Those are the core mindblowers right there. The rest of the app is very, very nicely designed, and does everything I’ve tried to do with it (save one minor quibble which is just me being picky and annoying since it involves a feature I wouldn’t have dreamed of, never mind expected before).

If you have a Mac, particularly if you have multiple Macs and a .mac account, I strongly recommend this application. The smart lists and sync capabilities alone are worth the price of admission ($24.95 USD per license, which I will be paying shortly).