Filed under: Software, Blogging, Internet Tools
Free RSS reader Vienna
It's free, it's open source, and it's in beta. Vienna is a pretty sharp little RSS/Atom reader. I put it up against NetNewsWire, and it held up pretty well. Despite some strangeness involving dates, I actually like parts of Vienna better than NNW. For one thing, there are already three handy Smart Folders set up for you: Marked Articles, Today's Articles (the one I had date issues with), and Unread Articles. Once I set it up to operate pretty much the same way NNW does, the only difference was a simpler interface in Vienna, a brushed metal UI, and less resource hogging. Hm. This Vienna thing is pretty cool... The full release is supposed to go live before the end of the year, so I guess it will be a happy holiday for the automated webomatic...
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Alex said 8:14AM on 10-03-2005
Nice. Thank you.
I think the date issues are not Vienna's, but rather the RSS publisher's. I've noticed in many RSS readers that if the Date is not properly set, it will just be replaced with the "first download" time.
Alex
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Sarah said 8:43AM on 10-03-2005
I'm a recent convert to NetNewsWire having given up on Bloglines; the killer feature for me is the ability to sync subscriptions between multiple machines using .Mac or FTP.
BTW NetNewsWire is only missing the "Today's Articles" folder - it already has "New Items" and "Flagged Items" subscriptions; you just have to turn them on from the View menu.
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Allen Ormond said 9:29AM on 10-03-2005
I've been using Vienna for about 3 months now. Obviously I like it. :)
It has some room for improvement but the author has been doing releases fairly frequently, which is nice to see.
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Sacco said 9:31AM on 10-03-2005
NNW may have -- for the moments -- some advantages on Vienna, but remember that it is open source which his a remarquable plus. Futhermore, Vienna is free and compared with the free version of NNW it holds up very well (search engine, tab navigation, and a brilliant and helpful designer). I'm using it since septembre 15th and I'm not looking back to NNWlite.
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Travis LeClair said 11:12AM on 10-03-2005
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR! THANK YOU!
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l.m.orchard said 11:46AM on 10-03-2005
You know what else Vienna has that NNW doesn't? Try selecting multiple articles to mark as flagged/unflagged or read/unread. Also, try making a smart subscription which uses date comparisons.
Last I checked, NNW doesn't have either of these features, and I've been wanting them for a long, long time.
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Vincent Noel said 3:40PM on 10-03-2005
Vienna is nice, but not for memory consumption. With the exact same set of RSS feeds, and after a few minutes of use, Vienna is now using more than 40 MB of memory on my iMac, while NNW is still at 17 MB. I guess there are a few memory leaks in here. But it's a nice app nonetheless, the smart folders are extremely useful.
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Michael May said 3:45PM on 10-03-2005
yay! thanks v muchly.
hint for those moving from safari (like me):
After setting this as your default reader, go to bookmarks view, right(or ctrl)-click on your feeds folder, and click 'open in tabs' and all your feeds will be imported automatically. After liberal use of the 'mark all feeds as read' item, you're ready to go!
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John said 8:45PM on 10-03-2005
Dig the built in Growl support. And the cool Icon :)
It somehow feels more lightweight than NNW, more responsive, something. I like it. This may or may not be a bug, but I notice when you select a group and mark all as read, the article count doesn't reset until you click away from the group.
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