Social networking tools like Twitter and FaceBook might have grabbed the headlines in recent years, but for quality, in-depth content, websites and blogs are still king. And to keep a close eye on those you regularly read, a good RSS reader is essential. Here are five of our favourites.
NetNewsWire
Price Free
Contact Newsgator + newsgator.com
Once considered by many to be the king of aggregators, NetNewsWire thrives on a widescreen display, uses CSS to customise the way it displays feed items, and, best of all, is free. It has a number of built-in themes so you can customise the way it looks, and if you can find one to suit, you can create your own using CSS. It allows you to sync your news feeds using Google Reader, so you can keep track of them wherever you are. There’s also iPad and iPhone versions available.
NewsFire
Price Free
Contact News Fire + newsfirerss.com
NewsFire has a much simpler interface than most of the RSS readers here. It sports just two panes: one for listing feeds and one for displaying their contents. Click on a headline in the main window and the article is displayed in the same window. Smart feeds, which work in a similar way to iTunes’ Smart Playlists, allow you to set NewsFire to automatically filter your incoming streams, and matching entries will be consolidated into a personalised feed. NewsFire also integrates with Twitter, allowing you to share extracts from feeds easily with your followers.
Times
Price $30
Contact Acrylic + acrylicapps.com
Times tries to be different by displaying RSS feeds like a newspaper, to present news feeds as they might look if they ever got printed in a quality broadsheet. What’s more, an option in the application’s preferences lets you switch on a Page curl mode, so that clicked articles appear underneath the front page as it curls downwards. The text on the front page remains visible but back-to-front, as it should be when viewed from behind. It all looks gorgeous.
Sadly the eye-candy is not back-up by useful features or an intuitive interface. There’s no easy way to tell if an article has been read, and navigating articles is much more difficult than it should be. Hopefully this will be fixed in the forthcoming version 2.0.
Vienna
Price Free
Contact Vienna + vienna-rss.org
Vienna looks very much like Apple’s Mail. It’s three-pane interface displays feeds down the left hand side, headlines in a selcted feed in the top window, and the content of a selected fee below. Buttons on the title bar allow you to share the contents of a feed on Twitter or FaceBook, and you can also choose to push an article to a Evernote, or, if you want to post it your blog, to MarsEdit. There’s no support for syncing, but lots of ways to search and filter feeds, including a Smart Folder feature which allows you to specify criteria for inclusion by selecting them from drop-down menus.
Socialite
Price £19.39
Contact Apparent Software + www.apparentsoft.com/socialite
More than just an RSS reader, it’s a desktop aggregator for Twitter, Facebook and other web services. It can import RSS feeds, added manually or imported from Google Reader, as well as allowing you to keep up to date on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and Digg. Feeds are synchronised with your Google Reader account, and you can also browse the shared items of friends you follow on Google Reader. Close integration with Twitter allows you to post extracts from feeds to your Twitter account, complete with automatically generated short URLs.You can flag items that you want to read later, or add them to Instapaper so you can catch up with them later on your iPhone or iPad.
