Vienna & NetNewsWire

Switching from Vienna to NetNewsWire

For the last year I’ve been a faithful Vienna user for reading RSS feeds on my mac.

It’s a fantastic program: very intuitive, open source and full featured (including tabbed browser, skins for reading feeds, good search tool and AppleScript support).

Recently I decided to try NetNewsWire. Now free, but it didn’t used to be.

My main reason for wanting to switch is that I would like something I can read both on- and off-line. Recently, I’ve found myself in the lab waiting for something to incubate or centrifuge. There’s a free computer right there, but I can’t just jump on and surf the net; I’m dependent on my RSS reader and bookmarks to give me a direction for reading.

NetNewsWire syncs with NewsGator online, giving you access to your feeds anywhere.

I’ve imported my feeds into NetNewsWire and I’ve been using it for about a week. Here are some thoughts.

Vienna

In Vienna I had a system that I like and works well for me. I managed to get unread feeds of over 1000 down to less than 200, through some reading and some sacrificing (knowing that I would never read all of them). Now I oscillate between about 50 and 200 unread feeds.

In Vienna I had,

• Topical folders (blogs, design+blogging, friends, photography)
• Stuff that doesn’t fit in those (Dave’s Comic Feed, for example) aren’t in a folder
• I have some blogs that I read as soon as they publish, others can wait
• I usually knock the photography folder over all at once (with an internet connection to load images)
• Friends (the people I have actually met and know well) hardly ever update their blogs so the folder usually stays contracted
• If I get overwhelmed by unread feeds I mark them as read — they’re there to enlighten, interest and teach me, not stress me out!

What I loved about Vienna

• Sorting by multiple factors — if you click on Date it will sort by date (ascending or descending), then you can hit the circle button and the feeds will remain sorted by date but all the unread ones will be on the top
• If you select multiple articles (by Cmd+click or Shift+click) they all show up in the viewer, it’s a combined view without having to change the window layout (see screenshot above)
• Clicking in the space where an unread dot or a flag would be toggles the unread or flagged status
• The rest of the stuff is cool too: skinable layout, nice design, sorting into folders… stuff that most decent feed readers have now

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire has a typically pleasant layout (I expected one since people used to pay for this software). Upon setting up it asked whether I wanted to sync with NewsGator and offered log in/sign up opportunities. It’s very easy to use.

The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have the little tricks I liked in Vienna. The most disappointing was that it didn’t combine the view when I selected multiple feeds. I used to do that every morning to load the comics and read them on the train. Then I’d read other feeds that don’t rely on loading images.

Other than not combining the view (unless you change its layout) it doesn’t easily toggle statuses with the mouse. The most efficient way is to learn the shortcuts (f = flag, u = unread, k = all read etc).

I like the way the internal browser works. By default it uses website icons in a sidebar rather than tabs. It’s a fresh way to do things; you can change them to regular tabs if you want.

NewsGator

NetNewsWire is a nice program, but to be honest the only thing it has up on Vienna (apart from some superficial features) is that it syncs with NewsGator.

At the moment I’m not particularly excited about that… NewsGator is not very pretty: the text is quite small, sections aren’t well delineated, it takes a while to load, and I can’t figure out why it’s put all my photography feeds in the main folder. It has clippings and tags, which seem cool… maybe not cool enough.

Conclusions

I’ve given NetNewsWire a fair chance. I like it, but I think Vienna suits me better. I might give Google Reader another go — if you use Firefox and install Google Gears you can read a certain number of feeds offline. As my husband pointed out, if I’m going to open another program to read feeds, why not Firefox?

Update 13 Apr 2008: If you’re excited by NetNewsWire, but you’re using Windows, check out NewsGator’s windows application FeedDemon.

Also, I’ve switched back to Vienna. I tried Google Reader with Google Gears and while I like Google Reader and Google Gears might work well for text, it doesn’t work with images. I didn’t expect it to download the images from 2000 posts, but I’d hoped it would retain the ones that I’d already loaded. So I could load the comics, go offline then read the comics and other text feeds on the train. I guess it wasn’t meant to be. Still, Google Gears is pretty young, it might do better with images in the future.