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The Best Mac RSS Utility On The Planet Is Free.
Some of us like Safari (it’s simple and free), some like NetNewsWire or NewsFire. Some of us like free. The best RSS utility is free. It’s Friday, so it’s gotta be free. Alex knows her place in life. In case you’ve been living on another planet, RSS is a nifty tool that brings news to your Mac, so you don’t have to click and browse to get it. RSS, arguably, stands for ”really simple syndication” and it means web sites, such as Mac360, provide a little feed of updated headlines and a summary for everyone online. Your Mac, via Safari or another RSS reader, checks Mac360 regularly for updates, and downloads the headline and summary so you don’t have to click to the home page and scan for what’s new. In other words, our news comes to you. There’s no more efficient way to grab more news in less time than RSS. Over the years we’ve preached RSS and reviewed a number of superb Mac utilities that ”just work.” For example, Jeffrey spent a whole week changing his online news reading habits and came up with a good review of the popular but expensive NetNewsWire, a worthy RSS reader. He called it the best news tool ever. Jack and Carol highlighted the benefits of RSS and various feeds, especially as regards Safari. For RSS, it’s hard to beat free, and that’s what you get with Safari’s RSS reader. A year ago our anti-diminutive literary leader extolled the virtues of virtuous news reading with a quick look at the Mac’s more popular RSS news readers at the time. Bambi loves RSS. Nearly three years ago, Mac360’s founder and original techno-babe, Tera Patricks, pushed the benefits of using an RSS reader long before the great unwashed masses on Macs could spell it or knew what it meant.
Today, RSS news reader utilities are everywhere, and do everything. Mostly. The one thing most don’t do well is do nearly everything and do it for free. Vienna does. As the reigning Mac360 Value Vixen™, it’s my sworn duty to uphold value, truth, free utilities, and the Appian Way (they make pastries), wherever possible, and whenever called upon. Vienna is an RSS news reader utility in a different class. That means it does more than Safari does for RSS but at the same price (did I mention that Vienna is free?). Vienna is open source yet provides a feature set comparable to the commercial RSS readers. Seriously. First on the list is ease of use, simplicity, lack of clutter. Vienna uses the now familiar left column, middle column, sometimes right column design. You feeds are on the left, you read on the right. Support is present for RSS 2.0 and Atom news feeds, the two most popular. All you need to do is drop in the RSS link, and Vienna takes care of the rest of the deciphering and formatting.
Absolutely imperative is the integrated browser display so you can click on a news link and see the page without having to click over to Safari or Firefox or whatever.
Second is support for smart folders and folder groups. That’s become the defacto way to organize information on the Mac and Vienna delivers an intuitive interface. The problem with switching to something new is the learning curve and entering data. Again. And again. Vienna imports OMPL format data from most other RSS readers so making a switch is mostly painless. What I like about certain Mac applications that meet my Value Vixen™ Seal of Approval is the attention to detail. You’d expect it in a commercial utility, perhaps less so in an open source tool. Vienna just doesn’t disappoint. Articles can be filtered. There are multiple pane layouts, so you can move links below, articles to the right, whatever works. I’ve gotten into the hang of flagging articles for future reference and popping them into the “Marked Articles” smart folder. See what I mean? Plenty of features, stability, dependability, familiar interface, easy-to-import function, and priced right. As in free. As in beer. Vienna is pretty slick, advances RSS beyond the basics in Safari, yet competes with some of the more popular commercial RSS readers. What’s your favorite RSS utility? Why? How do you use it? How many RSS feeds do you subscribe to and how much time does RSS save you daily? Check the thread and links in the Mac360 Forums for more details. Update - As of now, both NetNewsWire and NewsFire are free. • Article by Alexis Kayhill • Published on Monday, March 3, 2008
• Category: Encore Reviews • 9 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now
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Talk Back to Kate, Ron & the Mac360 staff Michael says:
I have been using Vienna for about 6 months now and it is great. The only feature I miss from some other commercial readers, like NetNewsWire, is the .Mac synchronization. Especially now that storage space on .Mac has been upgraded, it sure would be nice to use it a little more to synchronize between my various Macs and also as a backup. Other than that one small quibble though, Vienna is great. I can’t see paying for something else. — Posted on Wed Aug 22 at 6:38 am by Michael
Outofthebullpen says:
Does Vienna have a ticker? Has anyone had good experiences with RSS readers that use tickers? I have been using a Firefox extension which is great except for lack of fine-tuning features like preferences for individual feeds (such as how many headlines to run). I’m also especially interested in an RSS program that will run a feed on my desktop. The ones I’ve seen are for PC only. Thanks for the review and comments above, as well. Outofthebullpen — Posted on Sat Aug 18 at 12:47 am by Outofthebullpen
Steven Hambleton says:
Thanks for that Tim!
I’ll be downloading that when I get my MacBook — Posted on Mon Jul 30 at 10:15 am by Steven Hambleton
Tim Stringer says:
Vienna does support secure feeds. I have used it with Basecamp and it worked flawlessly. Overall I think Vienna is an amazing application - and the price is certainly right. But, I settled on NetNewsWire 3. It has some very nice features, such as synching with NewsGator or .Mac that are missing in Vienna.
But, for most people I think Vienna provides more than enough functionality. And the price is certainly right (free — Posted on Mon Jul 30 at 10:06 am by Tim Stringer
Steven Hambleton says:
@Wil Basically it’s an RSS feed that requires a username and password to subscribe to. I use 37Signals Basecamp for client projects and I can’t use Google Reader etc as it doesn’t support password protected feeds. — Posted on Fri Jul 27 at 9:25 pm by Steven Hambleton
Wil Gomez says:
I wonder what the advantage is to a “secure” RSS feed. About all you get is a summary and a link and a headline. That said, I’ve seen a few RSS feeds show up with ads recently. — Posted on Fri Jul 27 at 9:12 pm by Wil Gomez
Steven Hambleton says:
@iggy I don’t know, to be honest I don’t own a Mac yet (I am ordering in September) but I use an online project manager that allows me to subscribe to secure RSS feeds. The only program I know to support that is FeedDemon (PC) so I thought I’d ask the question. I wasn’t criticising! — Posted on Fri Jul 27 at 8:53 pm by Steven Hambleton
iggy pence says:
Secure RSS? Why? Regardless, I just checked and Vienna is free, so easy to try it out. Are there any other RSS readers that have a “secure” feed feature? — Posted on Fri Jul 27 at 4:18 pm by iggy pence
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