Feed the Fire – NewsFire and RSS Readers

Over the last couple of weeks, PulpFiction has been breaking down on me. It started with the poocs.net feed about a month ago. This I wasn’t too fretted about — I figured something odd had happened to the feed. Then it happened with SlashDot. Now that’s something I can’t do without. I’m sure it’s just PulpFiction, since OmniWeb could read SlashDot’s RSS just fine. So I went on a hunt for other decent RSS readers for Mac OS X.

I liked PulpFiction because it was user friendly. It behaved (and looked) a lot like Mail and I was happy with that. Apparently my requirements have changed. Currently I’m on NewsFire. To tell the truth, I really don’t even like it that much. There is so much left to desire, but I still stick with it. Why? Simple: it’s probably the most aesthetically beautiful program I’ve ever seen (Mac OS or not). Being by the same guy as Acquisition, the quality of the product is great, too. The GUI effects and transitions can’t be captured on screenshots – you’ll just have to see them for yourself (like the animated re-ordering of feeds based on akin to that of iChat’s sliding transitions for contact status changes).

But again, there are several features to be sought after. First off, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to mark an article as viewed without actually viewing the contents of the article at least in the NewsFire viewing pane. I understand that the design is supposed to be minimalist-with-flare, but would it be so difficult to just shift-click on an headline to mark it read, or have a little check button on there? Also, there’s nothing I can see that mirrors PulpFiction’s ability to e-mail an article directly — PulpFiction had a nice button in the toolbar ‘E-Mail this Article’ which would pull up Mail’s compose window (didn’t test it with any other mail client as my default) with the article contents and link already nicely placed in there for you. This was a very handy feature in PulpFiction, but now I suppose I’ll have to revert back to the god-aweful copy-and-paste procedure (oh the horror).

All in all though, NewsFire is a wonderful experience. It’s more than pleasant to the eye and I’d recommend it to most people.

Note: I also tried NewsMac Pro (it kept crashing, so that was thrown out pretty quick), NetNewsWire 2.0 beta (nice, but not as purdy as NewsFire), and OmniWeb (which crashed too, and just plain old wasn’t the kind of interface to RSS aggregation that I wanted). Safari RSS just wouldn’t cut it — I don’t want a personalized newspaper, I want my RSS feeds like an Inbox. Why couldn’t Mail 2.0 do RSS?!