Related link: http://www.newsfirerss.com
I admit it: I’ve been bitten by the RSS bug. Gone are the countless hours I’d waste browsing around all of my favorite sites throughout the day. Waiting for Slashdot to post some new nerdy news. Hoping for a new CPU article over on Ars Technica. Poring over the latest essay from Paul Graham. I’d spend so much time flipping around in all of my bookmarks, needing an information fix.
Then, I started hearing about RSS. The first time I dabbled with it, it was with Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire. An excellent little app that helped me automate the retrieval of my sites. A great way to help me divert my attention to other tasks instead of waiting for the latest gizmo to appear on Engadget. Obviously I wasn’t the only one enjoying the app; Brent Simmons brought home the gold in O’Reilly’s first Mac OS X Innovators Contest.
Since then, a lot of other news readers have come onto the scene, including Shrook and PulpFiction. There is a growing number of RSS tickers, such as Stickler. And it seems like they’ll give just about anyone an RSS feed these days.
However, a friend of mine recently pointed out NewsFire and I decided to take a look. While not exactly ground-breaking feature-wise, NewsFire has some delicious eye candy and breathes fresh air into the news reader UI. At first appearing rather minimalist, I found its implementation of article browsing to be fantastic. It’s still a two pane interface, but can present item bodies and item listings in the same pane, depending on the view. Here are some screenshots for the curious:
Feeds and article list
Displaying an article
While still in a very, very early release, NewsFire looks like a promising little app. And it’s definitely a gorgeous UI, much like David Watanabe’s other app, Acquisition. I only have a few little gripes. For example, when viewing an article, there are two buttons in the upper right corner. These buttons allow you to move back and forth between articles, but I wish there were a third button: Next Unread. Sure, there’s a keyboard shortcut, but RSS is a mostly mouse experience for me.
It would also be nice if the number of unread articles was displayed on the Dock icon. Smart groups certainly wouldn’t hurt, but I think I’m nitpicking. It’s too early to judge exactly where this little app is going, but it’s certain it’s going somewhere great.
Given NewsFire a spin? Wish it had some killer feature from your favorite RSS reader?
Unread Messages
I'd like to second the call for the number of unread messages to be displayed in the dock icon.
The whole reason for using RSS feeds, for me, was to not have to manually check all the web sites that I daily visited. I have now grow accustomed to not even having to bring my news reader to the foreground in order to discover if there is anything new to read.
For this reason alone I'll stay with NetNewsWire Lite for now.
Manual News Checks
What is the purpose of this? I thought the whole reason for RSS was so that we didn't have to keep hitting a refresh button like we did for USENET (other than the filtering out of the crazies).
BRV
A Yay for NewsFire
Just have to do the annoying "I agree" post -- but I do really like this app and had to give it a boost. I think it's set to become very useful!
AG
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If it ain't broke don't fix it.
NetNewsWire is a great app for me. I didn't see anything here that would make me want to trash it and move on. While this is early and I'll probably come check it out when it's finished it really doesn't look like it'd do anything more for me than what I have now.
Firefox!
The new Firefox (prerelease, version 1) has RSS built in now, very nice.
Re: Firefox!
Yes! I recently installed FireFox on a friend's Windows machine and was quite impressed with it. I really dig the download window and I think the RSS implementation is very well done. Feeds as a folder of bookmarks is a nice approach that's also present in the latest OmniWeb.