Quest is my game. Cheap is my name. No. Wait. Maybe that’s the other way around. My quest is to find worthy and inexpensive Mac apps. Cheap is just part of the quest. That’s it.
What I have today is another installment of my never ending quest to get Mac360 readers to use RSS subscriptions. Hey, they’re free. They save you time. They’re easy to spell. Do I need to pay Mac users to go all RSS? Apparently.
RSS Subscriptions Everywhere
If you’re into RSS, then you already know the value of subscribing to the RSS feeds from various and sundry web sides you frequent. Think of RSS as a site’s headlines and summary delivered to your Mac, updated automatically.
Apple built in RSS to Safari years ago and it’s decent, as RSS goes.
Standalone RSS apps do much more, of course. For example, the popular NetNewsWire lets you group your subscriptions making it easier to see what’s new from where.
Instead of using Safari or Firefox or Chrome or Opera to browse web sites one click at a time (the whole web surfing process is mind numbing and attention span deleting, you know?), use an RSS reader to visit dozens of sites to scan headlines and summaries and avoid all the advertising gimmicks.
RSS Subs In The Menubar
As if your Mac’s Menubar wasn’t crowded enough already with all the apps I recommend, here’s another. It’s called—get ready for it, here it comes—RSS Menu.
Someone went to a lot of trouble to create a cute, easy to get to, crazy difficult to navigate Mac app. Wait. Crazy. It’s in the Menubar, Alex. What’s crazy about that? It’s easy to find, easy to click, easy to use, and free. That’s three ways it’s easier to use.
And that’s the problem with the price of free and sticking something else into the Mac’s Menubar. Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. RSS Menu sits in the Menubar, awaiting your click. Click and ye shall receive, right? Yes. It’s what you get that’s in need of… of… something! Click the Menubar icon and RSS Menu gives you this.
Hey, it’s a menu of all my RSS subscriptions which were exported with a click from NetNewsWire and imported with a click into RSS Menu. And the Menubar is easier to find and use than sorting through windows on my Mac to find my RSS reader, right?
Ah, not. RSS Menu is very good for a couple of dozen RSS subscriptions, so use it for that and leave it at that. If you have a few hundred RSS feeds and they’re sorted nicely and neatly into groups, then you have a problem.
Exploding Headlines
The RSS Menu literally explodes (alright, not literally, but it will annex large chunks of premium Mac screen real estate) before your eyes as you navigate the menu from group to group to headline. Click the headline and Safari opens the page for viewing.
In other words, RSS Menu is another way of doing what you can do better within Safari or within NetNewsWire or within half a dozen other Mac apps that do RSS better—if you have more than a dozen or so RSS feeds, and if you have them tidied up in groups.
Otherwise, RSS Menu can be handy, but it’s not handier than Safari or Firefox for RSS, which you may already be using, so what’s the point of cluttering up your Menubar in the first place?
RSS Good. Use. It.
Do I sound bitter or frustrated? Yes. I. Am. RSS is such a wonderful tool and more Mac users need to use it. And, I’m just back from a week long vacation cruise, sans children, and a prison escapee driving a stolen dump truck scratched my car while I was picking up a palette of diapers at Walmart. I didn’t actually see the dump truck or the criminal but it’s a big scratch. So, please use RSS.
