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.
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.
AppleInsider has uncovered news of an Apple patent application for a software concept called a "podmap," which is more or less what it sounds like -- a series of maps or driving directions accompanied by an audio version of the same, downloadable into a portable media device. The way I understand it, think of it not just as downloadable directions, but also a kind of real-world tour. There is even mention of episodic content delivered via RSS.
Like many Apple patents, there's no indication (or even suggestion) that anything like this would ever see the light of day, but it does tell us that Apple is looking at doing more with marrying their hardware with maps software, just like the great improvements we saw in the iPhone's 1.1.3 update. Hardly a surprise, too, that a company so strongly turning towards portable computing is thinking about the needs of portable users. But a cool idea nevertheless, and it also confirms that Apple sees the iTS's podcast model as a strong and easy way of quickly distributing content of all kinds.
Feeder 1.5, a venerable champion in the area of RSS and podcast feed creation, editing and publishing just hit the scene with a host of improvements. In addition to an updated interface for Leopard, it improves on editing, video podcasting, enclosure redirects and more.
I'm pretty excited about the fact that Feeder's Sparkle support has been updated to automatically generate MD5 sums and DSA signatures, as well as handle password-less SFTP. If that's not your thing, you can get your RSS kicks in the improved template editor and support for the Media RSS extension that allows the inclusion of thumbnails in search engines and programs like Miro. And, in keeping with the times, the improved performance in tagging MP4 files will help anyone publishing for iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.
Feeder has a 15 day free trial and costs $29 to register. Version 1.5 is a free upgrade for all 1.x users. Check it out at Reinvented Software.
RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is becoming an ever more popular way to read online content quickly and without having to visit individual websites. As RSS feeds becomes more popular, so do the RSS readers that allow you to access the feeds. In my opinion, the two best RSS readers on the Mac are NetNewsWire and Vienna. Now that NetNewsWire costs the same as Vienna (i.e. nothing), what better time to take a look at what each has to offer?
Next week is going to be a busy one for the Mac blogosphere and TUAW is no exception. Sure, you can watch our Twitter feed for goings-on (we'll be reporting our location regularly), or subscribe to our Macworld 2008 tag feed, but what about keeping tabs while you jog? Enter Pingie. As Nik explains over on Download Squad, Pingie takes RSS feeds and sends SMS messages whenever something new pops up.
You can put in pretty much any feed you like, but Dan over at UNEASYsilence was nice enough to create a hot little landing page for TUAW's Macworld feed. Just put your email and phone number in, and you're ready to get updates as we publish them. Please be aware that you're gonna want the unlimited text messaging from whatever carrier you're with-- we don't want iJustine-style bills going to anyone.
To unsubscribe from the Pinged feed you can text "Ping Stop" to 95495. Let the pinging begin!
Wow. I don't know who hadn't bought NetNewsWire yet, but if you haven't, consider your wait vindicated: most of Newsgator's products, including NNW, Newsgator Online, and FeedDemon (the Windows version of the popular RSS reader) have all gone free with version 3.1.
Brent Simmons, NNW's creator, is reportedly happy about the change, to say the least, and Newsgator isn't any less thrilled themselves-- they say that not only are they excited to spread the love around to everyone, but that they'll also be using "attention data" collected from the software (which hopefully sounds more ominous than it is... right?) to "deliver a better experience for everyone." Not so happy might be the folks who've paid for the products in the past-- Newsgator is offering an automatic refund to anyone who purchased them in the past 30 days, but anyone before that just has to live with the fact that they paid $30 to use the software at the time (not that it was a bad deal back then anyway). Those who subscribed to the Newsgator Online service will run out their current subscriptions, and then continue on without charge.
Version 3.1 of NetNewsWire features an updated interface with new toolbar icons, some performance and memory enhancements, and the ability to archive news items as HTML files, viewable in any browser. It is now available, for a completely free download, over on Newsgator's site.
Blogger Shawn Blanc has written an exhaustively thorough review of NewNewsWire (We interviewed Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire, over the summer). He begins with a description of how he first became aware of the application and goes on to describe a history of the UI, his "favorite things" about NNW and concludes with an exploration of the paid version.
Note that Shawn intends to give other popular applications, like Coda, SuperDuper! and Transmit, the same treatment. We can't wait.
Just eight weeks after the teaser announcement, Vienna 2.2 has been released. I have been happily using Vienna for months. It's a light and simple RSS reader that's free and open. What more do you need? How about (new to version 2.2):
Snappier performance
Major UI improvements (no more brushed metal!)
Support for RSS/Atom enclosures, plus a new Enclosure panel for articles that contain enclosures.
Global search
Feed auto-discovery
There's a lot more to this major update, and you can read the full description here. Vienna is free, universal and requires Mac OS 10.3.9 or later.
If you like to travel light, check out Portable Vienna, which runs on a USB keychain drive.
Disappointed that one of your favorite sites hasn't broken out a widget for their RSS feed yet? Worry not, WidgetWizard's got you covered. Just fill out a quick little form, and the RSS feed of your choice is available in widget form.
Sure, it's not actually that hard to do, and the upcoming release of Dashcode with Leopard will make it even easier. But if all you want is to see an RSS feed on your Dashboard without all the fuss and muss of actually coding it, WidgetWizard is where it's at.
Netvibes is one of the largest players in the web2 portal game, allowing users to add all sorts of content and communication widgets to customizable pages, acting as a dashboard for your online realm. You can add widgets to watch RSS feeds, email from lots of services like Gmail and .Mac, weather, search engines, podcasts that can play in the page, calendars and a massive world of user-generated stuff that can extend Netvibes' portal in just about any direction you would want. For a while now, Netvibes has offered a mobile version of their portal at m.netvibes.com for regular phones, but now they have an iPhone-specific portal at m.nv1.netvibes.com (I know, I think they could've made it a prettier URL too). It offers complete access to all your tabs with that increasingly popular iPhone-like UI, and each tab lists the widgets it contains in a single column view, optimizing space and legibility. Even complex widgets like that Facebook widget the company recently introduced work fine, and the Twitter widget counts the characters I type in real time.
Since my NetNewsWire feed list now tops 330, I've been looking for an easier way to stay on top of a few of my favorite feeds in a simple UI when on the go with my iPhone. I still think the .Mac Reader is a good solution, but having all those feeds along with handy todo and social widgets in a slick UI is even cooler. This Netvibes iPhone page just landed near the top of my must-use mobile bookmarks.
The Mac is not lacking for RSS reading solutions, led by TUAW favorite NetNewsWire, but more choice is good right? Cyndicate is a new feed reader, but with a good pedigree. It was developed by some of the original talent behind PulpFiction, an older feed reader which was sold and then fell out of active development. So in some ways Cyndicate is what PulpFiction should have become (Cyndicate includes an importer from PulpFiction and there is a limited time upgrade offer).
Cyndicate uses a three-paned interface very much like Mail.app. A few years ago the designer of both programs offered some justification for this with regards to PulpFiction. Whether you like this paradigm or not will probably depend on how you read your feeds. Personally, I still feel that NNW offers the most efficient methodology, but that may be primarily because I'm most familiar with it. Cyndicate does offer some interesting features revolving around searching, filtering, and smart folders that hold out promise for organizing the torrent of information hundreds of feeds bring in, so I'll be giving it a closer look.
Remember that iPhone-only .Mac RSS reader Apple quietly introduced barely a day before the phone's release? After trying out nearlyevery iPhone web app launcher that has an RSS reader bolted on and even Newsgator Mobile for iPhone (since I primarily use NetNewsWire on a Mac), I have to say that the .Mac Reader (reader.mac.com) is my hands-down favorite. It's fast and displays RSS headlines in a very Safari RSS-like fashion, and it seems to cache better than most web apps I've seen, as it offers lightning-fast response when moving from an individual article back to the main list of headlines and snippets.
As a bonus, this .Mac Reader app doesn't appear to require you to be a .Mac member to use it, though since I am a member, I would like to hear from non-members on whether this assessment is correct.
If you already have a bunch of RSS headlines in Safari, or you use a trick like the NetNewsWire drag and drop one I just mentioned, the iPhone's one-two punch of Safari bookmark/feed management and the .Mac Reader could be a great way to bring your favorite feeds on the go.
Well color me surprised - after trying a few convoluted methods for exporting some of my NetNewsWire feeds in a format that Safari could import (as RSS, not HTML links to real sites), I finally realized that either Brent Simmons and/or Apple have already done some of the heavy lifting. If you toggle Safari's Show All Bookmarks view from the Bookmarks menu (or simply use ⌥⌘B), you can simply drag and drop one or multiple selected feeds from NetNewsWire into Safari's bookmark editing window. Unfortunately, you can't drop a Group of feeds from NetNewsWire, but this trick should satisfy most users who need to get some feeds into Apple's browser.
When you import feeds into Safari like this, it won't recognize them as true RSS feeds (or begin downloading headlines and displaying unread counts) until you visit them at least once. After that you're all ready to roll with a few (or all?) of your favorite NetNewsWire feeds in Safari.
If you use a desktop-based RSS reader other than NetNewsWire, be sure to let us know if this same trick works for your reader.
I'll admit it, I goofed. The screenshot for my post on using MisFox to set your Internet helper applications shows "Google Reader.app" in the pop-up of choices for the default RSS feed reader; this got several people quite excited. "Ooo! Can we set Google Reader as default? Can we can we huh?" they eagerly asked (I'm paraphrasing). Two teensy problems with my screenshot, though: first, the app listed as Google Reader is now known as Google Reader Notifier; second, MisFox won't actually allow you to set Reader Notifier as your RSS helper app. Argh!
Fortunately, the answer is simpler than I thought. Go ahead and download the excellent and free GRN; launch it and put in your Google credentials, and you'll immediately get the Growl notifications and pulldown menu goodness -- however, if you don't want them, go to the Reader Notifier preferences and check "minimal function mode."
Now, in your browser of choice (works for me in Safari 2, Safari 3 beta, and Firefox 2) go to Preferences, go to the RSS/Feeds section, pick the Reader Notifier application (in FF, you'll have to click "Choose Application" and select it)... and there's no step 4. From that point on, clicking the feed link in the browser's URL field will automatically open the feed in Google Reader rather than in your local feedreader.
For the record, of the helper-app preference panes I tested, MisFox and MoreInternet could not set Reader Notifier as the RSS default, but RCDefaultApp did it with no problem at all (not to mention it has plenty of other functionality). Enjoy, and my apologies to everyone who got hot under the collar from the original screenshot.
Coming hot on the heels of the 
Next week is going to be a busy one for the Mac blogosphere and TUAW is no exception. Sure, you can watch our 
Wow. I don't know who hadn't bought NetNewsWire yet, but if you haven't, consider your wait vindicated: 
Blogger Shawn Blanc has written an 
Just eight weeks after the 
Disappointed that one of your favorite sites hasn't broken out a widget for their RSS feed yet? Worry not, 
The Mac is not lacking for RSS reading solutions, led by TUAW favorite 
I'll admit it, I goofed. The screenshot for 
