NetNewsWire 3.0a8

Vienna didn't live up to the hype when I tried it about six months ago and quickly returned to NNW.

NNW 3.0 is still lacking capabilities that might never tempt me to occasionally look at alternatives; feed management and smart groups could be improved. The new Clippings feature looks like a method for grouping individual news items… much more useful (to me) than simply flagging them.

Hopefully development pace picks up a bit though the slowdown may be a permanent side effect of being owned by NewsGator now.

Chris, I guess that depends on how you use a newsreader. In several years of using NetNewsWire, and all the other News Reader programs I've tried, I have NEVER performed a search! I tend to read the articles, and if there's anything I think may be useful, I flag it (or Star it in the case of Google).

So for me, the lack of search in Google Reader isn't an issue at all. Besides, I'm assuming once it's gone through the Reader, Google may have indexed it, and you'd find what you were looking for via a Google search.

The other issue, for me, is I don't like lots of programs running all the time. My browser is always open anyhow, so I can leave a tab open on my GMail Inbox, one in Google Calendar, and one in Reader and I have less clutter, and less memory footprint than running iCal, Mail.app, NetNewsWire and the browser. Alternately, I can leave just about all programs closed, and see any new News Articles, Emails and Appoinments/Events in the menubar notifiers, and reading anything is one click away.

A warning: This version crashes a lot more than the previous previews of NNW 3.0. You may want to hang back a bit.

Vienna isnt a very polished product; they need a UI designer for sure. I gave it a spin today and was not very impressed. In the RSS world, you really get what you pay for (see NNW and NewsFire).

Google Reader is stupefying in that you cannot SEARCH posts. GOOGLE Reader. Cannot SEARCH posts. Makes no sense.

Douglas, I think even Switchers are able to read this post which clearly says this is an Alpha and decide for themselves whether or not they want to run this. I've been running the NNW 3.0 alpha for months with very little trouble.

Considering a lot of first time Mac Users will make their way here, should you really be touting potentially crashy and buggy software?

Not the best impression to give of Mac Software.

I love NNW and personally feel it is well worth the cost. I've tried nearly every other reader for the Mac and keep coming back to NNW.

Been loving the pre-alpha versions so far and can't wait until it gets to beta status, let alone release status. Downloading the update immediately.

I have to agree with #2, I've just started to use Google Reader, and I think it has better features than 99% of the standalone programs. I particularly love the way it can keep pulling 20 articles into the list when you get down the page, as I often find that in between trips to Reader, there have been too many posts and I miss most of them with a standalone program.

Coupled with the Reader Notifier (making that the default RSS reader in Safari) I'd be hard pushed to return to the likes of Vienna or Netnewswire.

I'll have to try out Vienna. Though Safari seems to work just fine.

Just to note:

This is NOT a beta. It is not feature complete and is very buggy. 3.0a8 is the FIRST public alpha.

Ben, what you were using for the last month was classified D for danger by Brent (the developer) and as pre-alpha.

I mention all this so no one thinks this is safe software to use at this point. If you're not up for potential data loss stick to the release versions.

All that said, I've been using all the 3.0 versions Brent has posted and think this is going to be a great update. I've tolerated a lot of bugs and missing features because I couldn't bear to go back and look at 2.0.

(And as for Google Reader, personally the web based reader just isn't responsive enough for me yet).

i'm still a tremendous Google Reader fan...