NetNewsWire

Prior to my switch to the Mac, I wasn't really a fan of RSS feeds. OK, I followed some blogs using Firefox. But that was all. I used to do my old web browsing using, well, a web browser.

But since I am relatively new to Mac OS X, I needed to gather information from the web and mainly from sites that, as a former Windows or Linux user I didn't visited. This pointed me to discover a considerable amount of resources.

I need(ed) to know tips and tricks to improve the use of the MacBook, the OS architecture and technologies, and of course, software to cope with the daily tasks I perform.

I guess one of the first programs I noticed was Papers. I'll talk about Papers later, but in the support forums I noticed a workflow including the use of an RSS reader. By that time I was suscribed mainly to Apple's downloads RSS and a few blogs, first using Mail and more recently using Safari. Although both behaved very well, I was wondering if a program developed exclusively to work with RSS (or Atom) was really worth the download. And it was.

The reader was NetNewsWire. The post in Papers' support forum said NetNewsWire was a shareware program, though I had a nice surprise when I visited the webpage to download it and give it a try and noticed that it was been given as freeware. So I downloaded it.

Using NetNewsWire is really straightforward. Whenever you open a feed page in your browser, NNW will pop up and ask you to suscribe to the feed. Inside it's Sites-Drawer (View -> Sites Drawer) it will point you to a lot of useful feeds ranging from Macintosh related ones to Health, News, etc. For example, thanks to NNW I discovered many developers' blogs, that introduced me to new software and techniques. That's how I noticed Today, which I recently reviewed in this blog.

Among the many features of NNW is

• the use of a CSS style to view all of your feeds with the same style, with many built-in ones and the possibility to use a custom one that may be written by you or a third person
• three different layouts (traditional, widescreen and combined) with options in each one
• tabbed web browsing capabilities. Although NNW is not intended to be used as an actual web browser, this feature is handy to quickly view the complete article of a given feed
  
• save clippings to keep permanently an item you really liked
• flagging items
• smart lists, like the ones in iTunes (yet another reason Mac OS X is a nice, powerful operating system. Check this video for an introduction to "smart stuff", i.e. folders, lists, collections)
• Spotlight indexing of news items (so they are searchable from almost anywhere on your Mac)
• Integration with iCal, iPhoto, Address Book, Mail, Growl (for notifications), and one-button easy posting to del.icio.us and to weblogs using an offline blog editor, like MarsEdit.
  
• synchronization of your feeds through all your computer and web-enabled mobile devices, either using a free (as in free beer) NewsGator account, or a MobileMe (formerly .Mac) account
• if you opt for the NewsGator account, you can read and update the read/unread states with NewsGator Online (a web-based reader) and with other aggregators on other computers and mobile devices
• for those of you that own an iPhone, there's an iPhone version too
• for the geekier user, it is scriptable using AppleScript
  

The help files of NNW wil really teach you almost anything you need to know to master the program.

And just to give an example how a good software changed the way I interact with a technology, in this case, RSS, I passed from as much as 5 feed subscriptions to this figures, extracted from NNW usage report as I was writing this:

• Unread Count: 170
• Number of feeds: 41
• Avg. unread: 4
• Number of news items: 2500
• Avg. news items per feed: 60

And it's still growing, since I feel that I am just carving the surface of the feeds I would find useful. And I have unsuscribed from several feeds that I didn't find useful. This 41 feeds are from stuff I really care of and enjoy reading.

An overview of the history of NNW is available in this Wikipedia entry (that I used to enhance some of the features of this review).

The blog of Brent Simmons, the developer of NNW is located at ranchero.com

Today

Today is a nice tiny app intended to have a handy way of adding or modifying iCal's events or tasks without having to open iCal itself (or to keep it open).

Each event or task can be edited directly in Today or be revealed in iCal. There are buttons in the bottom of the window to create new events/tasks. No special setup is necessary to make it aware of iCal's calendars. In the preferences pane you can choose to show or hide specific calendars. There's a video on Today's site that explains the most common features of the program and an image is worth a thousand words. (Better yet, as it's actually a sequence of images).

But what I enjoy the most are the shortcut to invoke Today, the ability to stay in front of other windows and setting the transparency of the window.

After installation, I immediately jumped to the preferences window. There, I opted for putting Today in the menu bar, and assigned a keyboard shortcut to make Today's window appear. For me, this keyboard shortcut is Command + Option + Control + T, as it reminds me the one used to activate the speech service in Leopard (Command+Option+Control+S), which I use a lot. But of course you can set something simpler.

So anytime I need to add a new event or task, simply check if I'm available or see what comes next in the day, I just use my (probably not so short) shortcut and I'm done. Although iCal is not a voracious memory consumer as other calendar apps (Microsoft, I'm pointing at you), it's nice to have an app like Today that is even more lightweight and allows you to do the most common tasks without consuming more memory or cluttering your desktop.

If I am arranging more than one appointment or planing tasks (especially common when I am using any form of instant messaging), I find useful to keep Today's window in front of others and a little bit transparent. That way I don't have to worry to switch between windows in order to see if I am available for next Tuesday at 6 p.m. and am still able to have a clean desktop. And it also accomplishes the noble purpose of providing some eye-candy.

I still use iCal, though, to view my calendars in the week or month views, or to create, delete or subscribe to calendars. But that means I specifically need to use the whole iCal. As Today's developers pointed out, the name says it all: it is intended to focus on one day at a time. But you are not stuck with the current day, you can jump to any date you want clicking the arrows at the top of the window.

Something that I think should be fixed in future versions or updates is that when opening an event that has repetitions from Today to edit it in iCal, it opens the starting date rather than the current date. It can be a little confusing. Besides, it is a nice app to have and use.

Today sells at $15 as of the time of this writing. A 10 days full featured demo is freely available here.

Hello, World!

This is the traditional Hello, World, just to honor traditions and have a clean conscience. I have always thought that a Hello, World always gives you good luck.

I am a recent switcher to the Mac. The purpose of this blog is to give readers enough, sound reasons to switch to the Mac and also to provide highlights on what software works for me. I have several facets as a user, as I am sometimes involved in communications, graphics design, teaching, etc, as well as scientific research. Yep, i do a lot of different things!

Hope you stay with me in this weblog.

Have a lot of fun!