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
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
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