NetNewsWire: My Initial Impression

Glimpse of a NewsGator website screenshot.Glimpse of a NetNewsWire screenshot.

I have been bouncing between jobs, keeping me sufficiently busy and out of the blogosphere.  Fortunately for me, moving to my current job landed me in a week with a fancy Apple MacBook, a far cry from my old junky iBook G4 (which is crumbling due to mistreatment and now misuse).  This all came about because I asked the IT guy at my office to hook me up with Leopard (more on that later when I find things that frustrate me).  Since I have been increasingly whoring myself out to the Apple fanboys, I felt a need to test the merchandise.  One item on the agenda was finding a solid application to read my favorite RSS feeds.

Glimpse of a NetNewsWire screenshot.

For my current job, I spend a lot of time reading them.  I, therefore, am very picky about what I am looking for.  I wanted something easy on the eyes, and more importantly, an application that syncs with a web version when I am not near a computer I own.  I would have stuck with Google Reader, but I did not find it so easy to forward the feeds collected to another application (let’s say for the sake of argument, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0).  Some people fought it out on a Ubuntu forum, saying that the feed icon I saw in Firefox would direct me to a feed of all the RSS feed posts I had in my account.  They were clearly wrong, and so I was pissed.  I tried a few solutions very briefly (and I mean speedy 10 minutes assessments of a few Google searches), and nothing appealed to me.  It was not until I checked out the NewsGator website, and their product NetNewsWire for Mac OS X (both 10.4 and 10.5), was I reasonably pleased with a synced RSS reading experience.

If it is not obvious to the masses, I hate proprietary software.  That is right, I am unabashed FOSS slut.  No one would expect that from someone who lusts for *nix platforms like me, right?  That being said, I really like this application, I am forced to deal with this something closed source until I find a competitor who can match or surpass them.

First of all, the possible themes range from edgy and stylish to easy on the eye (which I need, and I will explain later).  Moreover, you can upload your own stylsheets for your viewing pleasure.  I am not sure if someone is actively developing these, or the community is just sending them in like hot cakes.  I clearly have not a clue.

Secondly, it appears to handle more obscure encodings.  I digest a great deal of Arabic content, and few applications get this right.  I did find standard application bundles (Thunderbird) and web applications (Google Reader) that had managed to get the job done, but syncing was a deal breaker.  Also, Arabic 12 point font is relatively smaller than 12 point English, German, French, what have you.  I have no idea why, but this has been a constant problem for me.  I screwed around with Thunderbird for a while, but I could not hack it for some reason to make the the subject header to be bigger (help would be appreciated if anyone has a clue).  I clearly did not understand how to do it for anything, because changing the fonts only changed certain text elements (I love Thunderbird, but my understanding of the Settings Menu and the hackerish Config Editor is far from perfect).  Thus, having adjustable themes that handle these encodings, and allows me to see them with wrecking my vision, is a huge advantage for me.

Thirdly, organization is very nice.  Like the cornucopia of RSS readers, I can arrange different feeds, so you do not have to look at all your favorite bitstops (cute, no?) all at once.  If you have to read plenty of them for work and pleasure, this becomes tedious, believe me.

Finally, there is the syncing.  I own many computers, and use many for work-related purposes.  What happens if I do not feel like uploading a new OPML file every time I switch computers for a day or so, but not permanently?  Well, I use their “trendy” (believe me, I am kidding here) interface.  I really wanted to do this with Google Reader and Thunderbird, but there was no good option.  RSS Mixer is something some have been talking about work, but it is not as feature-rich as one would hope.  So, I am stuck with this.

And now, after all the teasing, here are full screenshots you all deserve.

NetNewsWire Screenshot

NewsGator Website Screenshot