I’ve always been a big fan of NewsFire as my feed reader for Mac OS X. I really don’t know why so many Mac users (particularly those who publish the Mac sites) have such an uncritical, undying love for NetNewsWire, but personally, I think that NetNewsWire is big and clunky. Now, yes, granted, it has gotten better since its version 2 days, but I still think that there’s just too much stuff there. RSS news feeds are supposed to be simple. What good is a complicated feed reader for something that’s supposed to be simple?

That’s why I’ve been a big fan of NewsFire, because it’s very simple and beautiful. It may not have the “power RSS” features (I didn’t know RSS had “power”) that NetNewsWire has, but it delivers a very comprehensive set of RSS readability in a very simple, very beautiful, Mac OS X-like environment that I highly prefer over NetNewsWire. It’s actually an interface that I could imagine Apple designing.

Yesterday, NewsFire was updated to version 1.5, which includes some additional refinements, particularly to make it much more Leopard-like, and today it was announced that NewsFire itself is now free for download and use! So, if you haven’t checked out NewsFire yet, I highly recommend that you give it a try.

Tags: feeds, free, Mac, NetNewsWire, NewsFire, reader, RSS, Software