Favorite RSS reader?

I find NewsFire brilliant, but buggy. My post on the subject (http://hiddenchemistry.com/2005/04/18/newsfire-crashes-due-to-specific-feeds/) attempts to explore a possibly reason why.

I can't believe nobody uses AmphetaDesk here. It's a great program. You can run the program, it has decent feed capabilities, and best of all, you read your feeds in your browser. Also, you can access the same feeds from your own mac, from any other machine, as long as you know your IP address. So, it's awesome. I feel hindered by having to read stuff in a small window, and I get irritated when an application launches a browser window to open up the link you clicked. Ampethadesk helped me maintain saneness when i read stuff. BTW, did I mention that this is free, and open-source :) Get it here! http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/

@Laurie: I have recently discovered the ways of NewsGator. I am contemplating subscribing to take advantage of the location features so I can mirror my RSS feeds across all the devices I use. This is one of the major reasons I would consider a web-based aggregator over a desktop reader: I work from way too many locations to be able to rely on a single desktop app. Someone mentioned FeedDemon on the Windows platform - it truly rocks. :) Someone else wondered why no one mentioned Shrook - I am wondering that myself. Perhaps because of the short trial period? I keep meaning to give it a spin because the feature set looks amazing, but I install it on a new Mac and by the time I really get around to sitting with it... the trial has invariably run out. @Mark: I really like your idea of a meta-XML reader. Seems like an elegant solution to the inevitable standards wars.

I know this smacks of promotional commenting, but it seems apropos to this post. We just released an XML reader for OS X. I wouldn't call it strictly a news reader (although it does many of the things RSS readers do) because it is user-extensible in such a way that you can customize it to read just about any format--I use it for reading Gutenberg XML books and NOAA weather xml feeds. I went this route because I thought it was silly that we need a whole new application or upgrade every time a new XML format rolls out--and in the world of RSS that seems to happen about every week. Also, I thought it would be nice to easily work with RSS modules. This little app works with XSLT to twist whatever input you give it into a the display you want. It puts the control in the users hands, which might turn off the tech-savy users who just want the news, but if you like hacking around with XML you might like it. It's really not too hard and I'm trying to document it well. Anyway, if you are looking for something a little different, take a look: http://www.pheed.com/pheeder/

As I see, many of you like bloglines.com - try Web RSS Reader (http://rss.plech.net), it's my favourite one.

Am I the only newsgator.com fan here?

How about some intelligent RSS reading? I'm developing read4me ( http://read4me.sf.net ) to sort RSS entries by a score based on what you'd like to read.

Thanks for the mention, Barb. We're working on multiple ticker support for the next version of Tickershock so that may help you with spanning multiple tickers on different desktops. We'll also make sure to take a look at DesktopManager to see if we can find a workaround other than Kevin Ballard's excellent suggestion above. All the best.

I'm a big fan of NetNewsWire. I have been beta-testing the software with Brent for a while now, and have found the software to be of excellent quality (especially in its 2.x incarnation) and Brent to be incredibly responsive and talented as a software developer.

I use NNW though I have been trying out NewsFan [http://www.makienterprise.com/newsfan/] for the past few days. It is still a bit rough around the edges but I like some of the features other readers don't have yet, namely, it plays podcasts directly or can send them to your ipod and it can distribute your feeds using filters to your email, website, phone or .mac account. It also can translate from multiple langages. It needs work, but pretty nifty.