News readers for Mac
On my Windows work station, I use Thunderbird to manage my news feeds. On my Mac, I only use web mail, so I don't have Thunderbird installed. Thus, I recently set out in search of the perfect freeware news reader for Mac.
I first tried the obvious, NetNewsWire Lite. Apparently, even the feature set of the Lite version has set the standards for functionality in the market. But I found one really important thing missing: there is no date column in the reader view! You have to open a feed item to see it's date. Well, I'm not willing to give that up.
Next, I tried MiNews, a Cocoa-written app that's skinned like Apple's iLife programs. It's pretty good, but I didn't find the display customizable enough.
I moved on to Vienna, an app that I heard about through Emily Chang's eHub. Now this one just felt right! Not only can you easily drag and drop the columns around in the view, but you can also download or create your own CSS default styles for formatting the news items. I did note that the styles would not download in Firefox–I had to fire up Safari to grab them–but then it was a simple one-click install and the style was loaded by default. Vienna also gets a positive mention on the Unofficial Apple Blog, though there's also a comment about memory leakage. I'll have to monitor it's performance; surely my older G3 will let me know if it's being taxed.
October 23rd, 2005 at 11:59 am
I think I'm using the full version of NetNewsWire. I was using it on a trial basis for a good while, and it shows the date column. I just paid for the license yesterday, and it was only $20. Not a bad deal for a good reader. I even regularly export my blogroll OPML and upload it to my site from it. I've been quite happy with it.
October 23rd, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Agreed, $20 is nothing for a good app. I must sound so cheap in my post! I'm not at all adverse to paying for software. At the same time, I also really like to support open source projects (which Vienna is), and try to reserve my spending for apps that I use alot. Finally, any time I can find something for free for the Mac, I jump on it. It seems that since OS X came out, more and more Mac freeware, shareware and open source has hit the market, but availability is still much less than with Windows.
Thanks for your comment!