I discovered Gruml a while back, but didn't write about it right away because there were too many glitches in the first beta to make it really interesting. Thankfully, recent releases have smoothed out the vast majority of the kinks, and I can now present -- with gusto -- a great RSS reader that interfaces with Google Reader.

NetNewsWire switched to syncing with Google Reader back in July, and I was pretty excited. Google Reader has been an amazing tool for me in the RSS world, and the more apps I have that all sync with it, the happier I am. However, despite seemingly endless trials and searches, I haven't really found the app that can top a Fluid SSB with a good userstyle. Gruml comes the closest so far, and it's free (at least right now, I'm not sure what the future holds after beta).

One of the things I like about desktop clients (when it comes to RSS readers) is scriptability. Gruml currently lacks the AppleScript dictionary that, say, NetNewsReader has, and I'd love to see it implemented. The keyboard navigation is decent, but not yet up-to-par with Google Reader's web interface, which can be navigated entirely with the keyboard. It might not make a difference to a lot of folks, but when I'm cruising through headlines I like to be all-keyboard when possible. The "Send Article to ... " menu is fantastic, covering 12 services ranging from Delicious to Twitter, and including Facebook, Ping.fm and Posterous. Note-taking, starring and sharing are all very well done, and sync perfectly with Google.

We're always trying new things around here, from apps to web services to hardware and all kinds of novel ways to do what we do. We also appreciate the fact that many of you read us via RSS or even the iPhone. To that end, here's a list of the many ways to enjoy TUAW in all its myriad forms. If you think we're missing something spectacular, let us know in the comments.

Heeeere's TUAW, in reverse order of no particular importance:

I have fervently wished for a desktop client to work with Google Reader for as long as Reader has been around. NewsGator finally answered my plea, announcing that NetNewsWire and the rest of the NewsGator RSS Reader Suite would be syncing solely with Google Reader after August 31, 2009. This signals an immediate move away from NewsGator Online, and the demise of the RSS feed syncing service.

NetNewsWire was a favorite of mine well before it became free software, and I'm excited to start using it again. While I've had a lot of fun tweaking my Fluid/Google Reader SSB, I miss the solid companionship of a desktop newsreader. I had originally given them up when I wanted to sync my feed-reading with my iPhone, as I wasn't thrilled with NetNewsWire on the iPhone at the time and Google Reader was the only choice left for syncing. Byline and Google's own mobile page were both top-notch, but up until today there were zero Google Reader clients (barring AIR apps ... I have my reasons) available on the Mac, so it was Fluid/Reader on the desktop. While I have the warmest of warm spots in my heart for Fluid, I'm ecstatic to have NetNewsWire back!

NetNewsWire is free, and a new beta with Google Reader sync is available for download. The updated NetNewsWire iPhone app is promised soon, but Byline will work for me right now. For current users of the NewsGator Online syncing service, detailed instructions for making the transition have been provided. You've got until August 31st to make the move and stay in sync. Lastly, if you haven't already picked a favorite stylesheet, don't miss Brockmann ... just another reason I've missed NNW!

Thanks Stephen, Barkin and everyone who sent this in!

Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader have been waiting with bated breath for the next iteration of the application, with the promise of the ability to mark news items unread and send articles to InstaPaper Instapaper, amongst other enhancements. As time has gone on, it became clear that Brent Simmons was working on other projects that are related to (but most decidedly not) the next iteration of NetNewsWire for the iPhone.

So what has been keeping him busy? As it turns out, NewsGator is rolling out an entire iPhone framework called TapLynx, which will allow its users to create content-rich topic-focused newsreader applications. The first such application, the All Things Digital iPhone app, was created by Simmons himself.

The goal of TapLynx is to offer users a framework that allows them to simply choose some images, set URLs for content feeds, and generate a media application for the iPhone without requiring any programming.

TapLynx is currently not even yet in beta, but you can sign up to get an alpha invitation on the TapLynx site.

By the way, for the NetNewsWire iPhone fans out there, it turns out that the next iteration of the app will be based on TapLynx, so even though it doesn't seem like there has been much recent movement, things are still progressing. We may even see the ability for NetNewsWire (both the Mac and iPhone versions) to synchronize with Google Reader accounts.

Most RSS readers on the desktop look like lists. Times, a reader Mat covered last year, looks like a newspaper. In a "normal" RSS reader, the river of information can become a blur and users may be put off by the incessant noise. Times, on the other hand, aims to make feeds more pleasant to peruse. Check out the gallery to see the curled edges, slight texturing on the sides of the "paper" and page effects. It's the app I'd get my grandmother to use to read RSS feeds, and I think it's a great introduction to feed reading for "the rest of us." Here's how to get started.

When you click on a story's headline or body text, the page folds down, and you read. When you're done, you click the folded page and it pops back up to reveal the feeds again. Added to this basic "graze and read" functionality seen on all RSS readers is the shelf (something many readers have as well, like the clippings in NetNewsWire), a place to temporarily hold stories you are interested in. You can read these later and then throw them out. Times isn't intended to be a storage locker or book reader -- it is designed for quick scanning and reading. Likewise, the shelf is only so large and can be set to automatically clear itself at certain intervals.

The first thing you'll want to do with Times is customize the feeds. Especially if you are setting this up for someone else (like grandma), you can easily remove the pre-configured feeds and add your own. I recommend not adding dozens of feeds to Times. While power users may scan hundreds of sites, the average person may only make time for a few. NetNewsWire and other readers are better equipped to serve the sort of information overload of a "power reader" and I've included a shot of Feeds and NetNewsWire for comparison in the gallery. Times is designed for some "light" feed reading and aims to make the process more pleasant, not powerful. I recommend no more than 6-8 per category page.

Next I'll show you exactly how to set up your own category pages and fill those in with feeds. Then I'll show how to use the shelf and sharing tools.

Thanks Vivek!

Postscript: Brian Mastenbrook, who discovered the Safari RSS vulnerability has posted a blog entry detailing how he discovered the problem, why he issued a warning and how long it ultimately took Apple to respond (6 months!). It's good reading and a good discourse on how our favorite company handles security threats and how they might want to improve.

This vulnerability is patched in the 2009-001 security updates.

When reports of security issues in Apple's Safari browser come over the transom, they get our attention. When they're exploitable in both the Mac and Windows versions of Safari, they get our full and undivided attention. When the person reporting them is Brian Mastenbrook (credited with discovering multiple previous vulnerabilities in Mac OS X)... well, someone shut off that damn klaxon and let us get back to work. In this case, the issue is that a hole in Safari's handling of RSS feeds could allow an attacker (via a malicious web page) to capture a user's personal information, cookies or even passwords.

While Brian has not posted more details of the vulnerability publicly, he has acknowledgment from Apple that the issue exists; hopefully we will see an update soon that closes this hole. In the meantime, although Windows Safari users are advised to use a different browser to avoid the vulnerability, Mac users can simply set an alternative RSS feed handler to work around the issue.

Update 1/14: Per Brian's further research, the workaround below is not adequate to protect against the vulnerability, as Safari also handles URL types of 'feeds' and 'feedsearch,' which cannot be set to alternative handlers within Safari itself. The revised workaround calls for the RCDefaultApp preference pane, which does let you redirect the other URL types.

To change your feed handler, go to Safari's Preferences and click the RSS button. If you have any other capable feed reader on your machine, you can select it from the list (if your menu looks like mine does in the screenshot, you have a serious problem with RSS reader addiction and you need immediate help). Don't have another feed reader available? NetNewsWire and NewsFire (and the open-source Vienna, cited repeatedly by our commenters) are free for the downloading, as is the Reader Notifier helper app that interacts with Google Reader -- for the purposes of getting around the vulnerability, it doesn't matter which application you choose as long as you don't leave it set to the default of having Safari do its own RSS chores. Note that the vulnerability apparently does not require you to open a feed in Safari to be affected -- a specially-constructed webpage is capable of triggering it.


RCDefaultApp settings for "feeds" and "feedsearch" also need to be modified.

Thanks to Brian for the heads up & everyone who sent this in.

News junkies: Every headline is our toke, every cutline is our crack. A true news junkie doesn't stop at just one app, feed, or source; s/he wants them all. Thankfully, your iPhone or iPod touch can be your connection to news from your community and from around the world.

While RSS feed readers like Byline and NetNewsWire let you customize feeds tailored to your interests, there are dedicated apps for a wide variety of news outlets and subject areas.

If you prefer having everything in one place, a feed reader is tough to beat. However, if you want to avoid drinking from the firehose of information, one of these specific apps might be for you.

Next, we'll take a look at a veritable cornucopia of news apps for any interest.

Thanks to diligent tips from readers, we're aware of some issues with our RSS feeds. Depending on what you use to pull our feed (Bloglines, NetNewsWire, Netvibes, Google Reader, etc.) your subscription may be "stuck" and won't automatically update. Rest assured we are working on this with the major feed reader folks and hope to have a resolution soon. Sorry about that!

Also, we are working to allow mobile Safari users to access the full site in addition to the i.tuaw.com optimized page. Again, sorry about the delay.

With the iPhone SDK, Apple is pioneering a new mobile development platform that is ahead of it's time; however, this innovation comes with a major caveat: It requires Cocoa (or Objective-C) programming knowledge. You may ask "Why is this a problem?" Well, someone might have a really great idea for an iPhone application, but not have the programming knowledge to back it up and follow through with the idea. This is where AppLoop comes in.

AppLoop is a brand-new service that allows anyone with a web browser and RSS feed to create an application similar to the AP News app and submit it to the App Store -- without ever writing a single line of code. Their service works by generating a .plist file on the server side (based on your choices). The file is then passed through a couple of AppleScripts that generates the code based on the choices, and compiles it.

The entire app-creation process takes less than a minute to complete, and you have an application ready to be deployed to the App Store. Ad-hoc versions can be requested in advance of the app being placed on the App Store. Currently, AppLoop is offering the RSS reader application, but they have plans to add additional paid features down the road.

You can find out more information about this service by visiting their website, or by watching the video [link here] above. You can also see a gallery of screenshots from one of their applications.



Thanks for the information, Eric!

Reader Stéphane M sent us news about a website he's put together called DoYouFeed that will apparently turn any RSS feed out there into an iPhone web app -- just punch your RSS/XML feed URL into the site itself, and you'll get a TinyURL back that you can bookmark in your iPhone to read the feed on demand. I'm not sure how scalable it is (there's probably a strain on both Stéphane's site and the RSS feeds themselves that could turn into trouble if too many people use it), but as a tool, it works just fine. There aren't ads on the first page you see of the feed, but there are some ads on the permalink pages of the reader, which again probably isn't too much trouble if you're just using the site for personal use, but on a larger level might ruffle some feathers.

Still, until the site goes down (for whatever reason), it's a pretty handy feed-to-web-app converter, and it loads quickly and easily on the iPhone (which is what all good web apps should do). NetNewsWire is free in the App Store, but if you don't want to get bogged down with a bunch of feeds at one time, DoYouFeed.com might be what you're looking for.

So let's say you can't stand the iPhone. "I can't stand the iPhone!" we hear you shout, repeatedly. Fair enough, Apple's "third platform" can certainly take over the news at times, and the plucky little touchscreen-that-could definitely generates strong opinions.

As a gift to those of you tired of everything iPhone, we cooked up an iPhone-free RSS feed for you. Never again will your eyes burn with the news of yet another dice-rolling app, or wacky accessory. One caveat: older iPhone posts might still show up (we're going back in time to fix those as we can), and once in a blue moon an iPhone post might accidentally appear. We apologize in advance for the quasi-cognitive dissonance.

UPDATE: For those of you who want an iPhone-only page, or any other category-specific page, please check out the long list of categories on the right. All those links under "Mac News" on down are category pages. Enjoy!

As someone who manages whole metric scads of information in Google Reader, I was excited to see Byline, from Phantom Fish software, in the App Store.

Byline, as you might expect, fetches all your subscriptions from Google Reader and displays them for you to read. It also keeps track of the items you've read and starred.

The greatest thing, though, especially for iPod touch owners and subway riders is this: Starring or Noting an item saves it on your iPhone or iPod for offline reading. If you star an item either using your desktop browser, Mobile Safari, or Byline itself, it saves it for later. Noting an item is even better, because you can save pages that aren't even in your RSS subscriptions for offline reading with Byline. They mention you can do this very easily with a bookmarklet.

Now -- I can hear you screaming: NetNewsWire does all this, and it's free! Without boring you with detail, it's worth ten bucks to me to keep my Google Reader workflow the way it is, rather than spending time changing the way I work. Agreed: it's probably too steep for people who aren't heavily invested in Google Reader already.

Additionally on the downside, Byline doesn't allow you to browse by tag, instead opting to lump everything together in one list by date. Phantom Fish says this is for performance reasons, as people with many feeds would experience sluggish behavior. They're looking into it, though, and I personally hope they figure it out.

Byline is $9.99, awesome, and available through the App Store.

Times is a new RSS reader with a snazzy interface designed to look like a newspaper. You can choose different RSS feeds to supply the content to the different columns. In the screenshot above I've got TUAW in the top, an Apple feed on the right, and I've left the space below TUAW clear where another feed would go. When you want to read a story the top page folds down and the story appears on a separate page behind it. At the top are buttons to go different sections, each with a different set of feeds. Finally there's a "shelf" where you can "save and sort articles for later reading."

While I couldn't possibily use Times in place of NetNewsWire for the hundreds of feeds I read, nonetheless it is a very slick piece of work. Times is $30 and a demo is available.

[via The Apple Blog]

Coming hot on the heels of the 1.5 release, Dave Watanabe's popular RSS reader, NewsFire is now free.

David posted this on his blog:
"After much internal debate, I've made the decision that as of today, NewsFire is totally free. No feature restrictions, no ads, no cut-down 'lite' version... this is the real deal."

Newsfire is just the latest in the growing trend of free offline RSS readers available for the Mac. In January, leading reader app NetNewsWire became a free program, joining Vienna, Safari and even Mail.app as alternatives to the 800 lb gorilla known as Google Reader (also free).

Whether or not some of the other freeware alternatives will be able to sustain development without the support of a company like Newsgator (which owns NetNewsWire) remains to be seen, but in the meantime, I'm loving all these new RSS choices that don't deplete my wallet.

Although David Watanabe has been a controversial figure in the Mac community, he does make beautiful looking software. If you aren't already married to your RSS reader, or you have been waiting for NewsFire to have full Leopard support, now is your chance to try it out.

Thanks Carlo!