When I wrote my RSS aggregators round-up some weeks ago, I hadn’t heard of NewsFire.
But since trying it out a week or so ago, I’ve been using it more and more. What I like is the simplicity. This is an app for reading feeds, and only reading feeds. But it does that job extremely well. The GUI uses all the cleverness of Cocoa but isn’t overdone.
Best of all, it’s a little app, my favorite kind. Only a 600KB disk image to download. Developer David Watanabe has made something not just useful and functional, but unobtrusive and a pleasure to use.
Hey, try it out. You might like it!
It's nice
I also like NewsFire. It's small, fast and has an intuitive interface, which is quite different from every other app I've seen. Only problem I have that it keeps crashing on my system and it doesn't save preferences. So for now it's unusable for everyday work, but it seems to be developing rather fast so I'm looking forward to it being my regular "feed-reader" soon :-)
//Magnus
That's it?
Why not tell us what you like and dislike about it? How does it compare to others? What makes it special?
That's it?
Heh, ok :)
I *like* the simplicity. I like that it takes almost no brain power on my part to make it work. I like that it makes reading my chosen feeds almost automatic, and very, very quick.
It compares very well to other apps. Almost every other reader/aggregator I've tried has performed slower than NewsFire on my machine, but that's got a lot to do with the machine being two years out of date and lacking a certain amount of processor oomph.
There's not much to not like. It's crashed unexpectedly a couple of times, but nothing disastrous has happened.
I like that on a day like today, when I am dosed up with paracetamol and trying to get rid of a cold which has bunged up my head like a sack full of cold refried beans, I can sit in bed, surfing feeds with one hand on the keyboard and the other clutching a mug of hot honey and lemon. Sniffle.
That's it?
Those sound like good reasons.
Have you ever tried "You Control"? This is a utility that adds several new menus to your menu bar, including weather, calendar, file system etc., but the best part is that it will add a menu for RSS feeds. What's more, you can have the headlines scroll across your menu bar while you do nothing (it helps to have a large monitor for that). When you click on the menu, you can see you selected feed sources as sub-menus. Click on or hover over any of those to see the actual headlines, hover on the headline to get a synopsis or click to read the whole article in your browser.
I like this because it is well organized, it pushes news to my menu bar for idle reading, it is extremely simple (you don't even have to launch anything, except to add more feeds or otherwise configure), and it doesn't crash. Plus it is part of an inexpensive package that adds a lot of value beyond just the RSS part.
I'm not sure if it handles Atom yet. I am not too familiar with that.