Most experienced internet users will tell you that if you really want to harness the power and purpose of RSS newsfeeds, little browser add-ons like Safari’s RSS viewer, Internet Explorer’s RSS viewer, and even Firefox’s live bookmarks aren’t the way to cut it. The real purpose of RSS is to serve as a “lite” version of a website’s regularly-updated (syndicated) content so that feed readers can regularly check the RSS feed for updates while being quick and light on bandwidth. To really harness the power of RSS newsfeeds, you need a dedicated feed reader.
NewsGator’s NetNewsWire seems to be the most recognized feed reader for Mac OS X. I personally haven’t had the opportunity to use it since the older NetNewsWire version 2, which was pretty clunky. NetNewsWire 3 looks a bit better, and in fact, many of the new features and much of the new interface in NetNewsWire 3 comes very much from my personal feed reader of choice, NewsFire.
Not many websites seem to remember NewsFire anymore, despite the fact that when it came out, it had quite a revolutionary interface for viewing RSS feeds and was pretty nicely heralded by Mac websites at the time. Now NetNewsWire 3 comes out with many of the same features and interface, and it seems to have been heralded and promoted to high heaven, with many sites forgetting that NewsFire is still around. But, quite frankly, I’m still in love with the compact yet powerful little feed reader that could.
What I like about the NewsFire UI (especially compared to that of the older NetNewsWire 2) is that it really pays attention to which tools and buttons you need, and which ones you don’t, at certain screens. The interface is very much like iTunes, with each feed listed on the left. Feeds with unread items glide up to the top (with an iChat buddy list-style effect), sorted by most unread items, and then dynamically resort as you read items). On the left, you can display just the feed name, or also display the first unread “headline” alongside the feed name. When you select a feed, all the items in the feed will display. On the top of the list, on the left, is the name of the site–clicking on that will launch the site in your web browser and also mark all unread items as read. There’s also a Mark All Read button conveniently up there. When you select an item to read, the link on the upper-left can now be clicked on to return to the full list, and the upper right offers previous/next buttons to quickly go through the items in the feed. Clicking on the title of the entry that displays will immediately launch the corresponding entry in your web browser. As a nice little added touch, you can tell NewsFire to make the window slightly transparent when it’s not the active window, though I personally don’t use that feature.
NewsFire is very flexible with adding new feeds. When you provide the feed address, NewsFire automatically looks it up and fetches the name of the feed, even before you click Add. This helps you to know that yes, you did enter a valid feed address.
NewsFire also has an interesting feature called a “Search Feed.” This feature lets you create a feed from a web search–whenever NewsFire updates the feed, it will do so by querying a search term you specify on a website you specify, and then update the feed whenever the results change. Unfortunately, Search Feeds are only limited to the limited number of search websites that are provided with NewsFire, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to add new ones. Still, it’s an interesting feature and an intriguing idea for the power of RSS.
NewsFire also allows you to combine your feeds into groups fairly easily, and it also lets you create a Smart Feed. Similar to Smart Playlists in iTunes, a Smart Feed automatically brings together content from all your other NewsFire feeds based on criteria that you set, which can also be a really useful feature.
NewsFire is a really nice, compact, easy-to-use application for subscribing to and managing your RSS feeds. You may prefer to use NetNewsWire, but at only $25 (cheaper than NetNewsWire), NewsFire is definitely an alternative feed reader to consider.
Final Rating: 
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