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

I’ve blogged about how Apple has really ramped it up against Microsoft Office with iWork ‘08. That is, they’ve ramped up against Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But what about Outlook/Entourage? Well, Apple also has its return weapon for Entourage, which is the combination of Mail, Address Book, and iCal, and in Leopard, Apple has added even more to these three applications to increase the competition. But are these enhancements worth their weight in gold? Well, Address Book hasn’t seen any significant new features, so I’ll ignore it this go-around. iCal’s Feature Presentation will happen later this month, which means today’s focus is on Mail.
Continue reading »

Tags: Address Book, calendars, data detectors, e-mail, Entourage, features, HTML, iCal, iPhone, iPod touch, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Mail, managers, newsfeeds, notes, Outlook, productivity, review, RSS, Safari, stationery, Stikkit, sync, templates, to-dos

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.
Continue reading »

Tags: feed, Mac, News, review, RSS, Software, subscribe