Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Productivity, Internet Tools, Reviews
Switching from NetNewsWire to Google Reader
I'm not typically one for the web 2.0 movement. I'm a huge fan of the power and flexibility of Mac OS X, and I usually find most web services no match for their desktop counterparts with maybe a few syncing services thrown in to even the odds (.Mac, Google Browser Sync, etc.). This all changed, however, when Google dropped a quintessential upgrade bomb on Google Reader, their web-based RSS reader a la BlogLines and NewsGator. If you're curious as to what the new gReader is all about, I wrote up a walkthrough for Download Squad, but in a nutshell: it's awesome. So awesome, in fact, that after spending a serious week with it for all my personal and blogging needs, I feel confident in cutting my ties (yes, again) to NetNewsWire. Just like Gina over at Lifehacker, the plethora of new and well-polished features in this updated to Google Reader are an absolute dream in the category of web-based readers, and a number of factors clicked to make this my go-to reader of choice.
Power
The most appealing, of course, is the sheer power of the new Google Reader; it truly feels like an application. It's fast, responsive, and behaves like a desktop app. It features a typical expanded view, where all articles are listed in their full form on the right, but I prefer the List View which I have pictured here, with its unique way of expanding only the article you select in-line with the rest of the headlines. Another wonderful new addition to gReader's tool belt are lots and lots of new keyboard shortcuts; it is now possible to navigate everything in Google Reader - the feed list on the left (even expanding folders), headlines, articles, everything - from the keyboard. I'm not saying NetNewsWire can't do this - I'm simply impressed at how well gReader, a web app, pulls it off.
Organization
I have over 300 feeds covering topics for personal, freelancing and blogging purposes (yes, you guys), and Google Reader offers some great ways of bookmarking, sharing and tagging both feeds and individual headlines. The first and easiest method of saving important headlines is, of course, the typical Google UI of the 'star' - marking a star next to a headline, just like starring messages in Gmail, is just like flagging headlines in any other reader. Google Reader goes farther, however. Much farther. Headlines can also be individually tagged, and those tags can have their own RSS feeds, allowing me to easily tag and organize articles for TUAW and for my personal blog. At the tail end of organization, gReader also features a 'Share' button (and keyboard shortcut) for headlines, which creates an actual public webpage with a list of shared (and styled) headlines, that can also be inserted easily into something like a blog sidebar. You can think of it as a quickie-linked list. While certainly not all RSS users need all these fine-toothed filing and sharing features, they're a blessing for my various lines of work, and it's great to have all this under the umbrella of a powerful web app.
Portability
I get around. I bus it to downtown Denver for classes, and I'm constantly running around town doing a lot of errands my wife can't because she works 20 hours a day as a high school English teacher. Being able to fill those few minutes of waiting at the grocery store or the dentist's office by accessing my Google Reader feeds online with my mobile phone is a very handy thing. This feature didn't seem to receive any major upgrades with the new gReader (c'mon, it's mobile web - how great can it be?), but not having to sync my feeds or OPML files between a few newsreaders is a very nice burden to have off my back.
No hard feelings
I'm not writing this post to bash NetNewsWire; while I have a few gripes with it, that app has served me well for years, and I'll still keep it around for emergency purposes, for sure. I also think
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Arron. said 2:39PM on 10-08-2006
...how very interesting.
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Hervé S. said 2:41PM on 10-08-2006
It is very striking that nowhere in your column appears the fact that you are transfering your personal information from your mac to a free service.
Free as in... "can change any time without warning" here.
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gisli said 3:15PM on 10-08-2006
..i´m using Vienna on my mac and im loving it like a big mac
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Todd said 3:29PM on 10-08-2006
Thanks for the writeup. Personally, I can't deal with switching to something that doesn't have a search (something sure Google will eventually add), nor can I really accept moving to something that just isn't aesthetically pleasing to me. That said, NetNewsWire has some pressure on it now, as do all desktop-app readers, to do some interesting things with system integration and client-side storage in order to show their unique value. NNW has to be doing something with its rather huge memory footprint, after all.
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Christian said 3:13PM on 10-08-2006
I went to try google reader and when I paste the feeds into the "Add Subscription" box I get an error.
For Example when I paste in
feed://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/recent.rss
I get
"No feed available for feed://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/recent.rss"
So far, I like Safari's built in feed reader much better.
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Christian said 3:18PM on 10-08-2006
Nevermind. I found out that you need to put in the homepage site and not the actual feed URL. That's pretty silly.
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Andreas said 3:26PM on 10-08-2006
funny you should mention it... i also switched to google reader a few days ago and i am one satisfied customer. after an awkward first version i gave google reader another shot originally because newsgator's windows client is, um, severely lacking.
my feature requests for the beta release (or whatever) include: dashboard widget or integration with google notifier, searchability and history of followed items. also, the ui needs some tweaking.
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Carlos said 3:53PM on 10-08-2006
I've been considering the same move. I mean, NetNewsWire is great and all I paid for a license, but it's not doing much for me that Google Reader won't now that it was redesigned and that gives me a way to use it on multiple computer, or any computer that supports modern standards. I mean, NetNewsWire can try for a web-side client, but NewsGator Online is a steaming pile of cow dung.
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Ed said 4:26PM on 10-08-2006
Well, currently I only follow about 10-15 feeds so I use firefox's Live Bookmarks, but I'm thinking of using Google Reader soon...
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Matt Gifford said 4:41PM on 10-08-2006
Hervé S.: It's also very easy to vote with your feet. If you don't like any changes they might make, you can simply export your subscriptions to OPML. Any reader worth using will have the ability to import that data.
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Erik said 4:40PM on 10-08-2006
Beatiful. I really like this. Google has done it again!
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JDM said 5:02PM on 10-08-2006
I have been using Google Reader for about 5 months now (having previously tried Safari, Firefox, and My Yahoo). IMHO Google Reader is by far the best. The integration with the Google Reader mobile is especially brilliant if you spend a lot of time out and about traveling. Even before this update the interface was nice, and very familiar to anyone who uses Gmail. Go ahead and try it - you won't regret it.
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jake said 5:20PM on 10-08-2006
Google reader still balks at data urls...
url('data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASAB inside a feed... very useful for keeping down the original server hits.
NetNewWire lite takes it very gracefully!
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Thomas said 5:39PM on 10-08-2006
I have recently switched to from Sage on Firefox and Flock's feed reader to Google Reader. The portability is big, but it's also sort of integrated into Firefox 2. Plus the new version is really nice.
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Paul said 5:29PM on 10-08-2006
What would be handy is if NetNewsWire could be configured to sync with Google Reader. I definitely prefer the Google Reader interface over Newsgator on the Web.
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Gerald Buckley said 5:41PM on 10-08-2006
I'm still plugging Safari's RSS setup. For one thing... If I'm on the plane... I can still read my feeds. Try THAT with Google Reader! Safari, actually does a GREAT job and I've blogged exactly how to make it work as Apple intended (but failed to document)...
http://gwhiz.wordpress.com/2006/08/22/safaris-rss-reader-features/
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Mithras said 6:52PM on 10-08-2006
Does anyone have comments on Google Reader vs. Netvibes? I moved from NNW to Netvibes six or eight months ago, and have really grown attached to it -- tabbed screens can show me a whole topic's worth of headlines at one glance, and then I command-click to follow up in tabs the stories that interest me.
Has anyone used Google Reader as well as Netvibes and have any comments?
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JDM said 7:05PM on 10-08-2006
I forgot to add this little Google Reader/Safari tip that I read on the Google Reader Team Blog (http://googlereader.blogspot.com). Go to Google Reader > Save the Reader feed as an RSS bookmark in Safari, then go to System Preferences and you can set your RSS Visuliser Screensaver to pull in your Google Reader feed.
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milevin said 8:03PM on 10-08-2006
What am I missing? I use bloglines service and cannot see much of a reason to switch to Google. What gives?
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Ed Fladung said 10:25PM on 10-08-2006
I agree with Milevin. gReader is way to slow, i see way too much of the not-so-cute google labs green beaker logo. And the ui is too cluttered with non-essential tools. give me simple. give me bloglines.
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