Lineup: Mac OS X RSS Readers
If you just want the bottom line, skip right to the conclusion.
Table of Contents
Introduction
RSS is my medium of choice for information overload. It gives me the ability to quickly screen a large number of news articles, blog posting, opinion pieces, etc. for information of interest to me. In order to accomplish this amazing feat, I need software to fetch all the disparate feeds and present them in a way that’s useful to me.
Here’s what I’m looking for in an RSS aggregator:
- Simple and intuitive interface: I don’t want to deal with crap, I just want to read my news, dammit. Something as simple as RSS shouldn’t require much brain-power. This is the most important criterion, and also happens to be the biggest problem with the reviewed programs.
- Growl support: I love Growl. It’s makes life better.
- External browser support: I thought this would be obvious, but apparently not. RSS for me is just a way to find out what interesting things there are on the internet; it isn’t a separate network altogether. As such, when I want to go to the website, I want it to be a normal internet browsing session, like any other. I don’t want to deal with some hacked-on built-in web browsing. I have a browser for a reason. Let me use it!
- Support for invalid feeds: not everyone’s a nerd. Not every knows not to copy and paste from Word, putting those nasty MS-specific tags everywhere. I still want to read their blogs.
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of things that a lot of people think are important. The way I see it, if they can’t get the basics down then it doesn’t matter how many “features” they’ve packed into the thing.
Methods
I used each of the following pieces of software exclusively for at least one full day (24 hour period):
- Endo
- Feed
- MiNews
- NetNewsWire Lite
- NewsFire
- NewsMac Pro
- Pheeder
- PixelNews
- Postino
- PulpFiction
- RSSOwl
- Shrook
- Strider
- Vienna 2
Believe me, 24 hours was pretty damn hard for some of these. No, really, I wanted to give up so many times.
On the other hand, since I only used them for a day, it was sometimes hard to fully adjust away from the NewsFire way of doing things, and so I may not be entirely fair to some of the programs that do things a little differently.
Results
There are some inconsistencies here in the features and bugs that I noticed. All be warned that I didn’t necessarily try them out in alphabetical order.
Endo
- First impressions: Looks quite nice. Simple. Clean.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- Managing the groups was unintuitive.
- No easy way to go to the next unread item when you aren’t in the inbox. When I Cmd-Tab to Endo, I find that I have to navigate to the next unread message. This might sound like nothing at all, but it’s really annoying.
- Growl support: No Growl support. They’ve rolled their own Growl-like notifier, but it’s not quite as subtle as Growl. It’s way too in-your-face, like they’re forcing you to read the headlines even if you don’t want to.
- External browser support: Works wonderfully.
- Miscellaneous:
- One feature I really like is the ability to have it mark updated articles as “unread” and then highlight the changes.
- Overall: Though my first impression was positive, I wouldn’t recommend this one.
Feed
- First impressions: Looks like you’d expect. The beta was very much not working (which is fine), so I bopped back to the stable.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- Easy to use. Keyboard shortcuts are intuitive. Very little learning curve.
- The current article’s title is displayed in a smaller font than the article text. Making it a little more prominent would be nice.
- There’s no easy way to go to the next unread article. You have to search through the feeds for those marked as unread.
- The number of unread articles that it reports is often inaccurate. A feed will say it has 2 unread when it only has one, leaving me scrolling through the articles searching for a second unread that doesn’t exist.
- Growl support: Theoretically supports Growl, though for some reason I haven’t actually seen a Growl notification from it.
- External browser support: Defaults to opening links in Safari in the background. This is perfect for me.
- Miscellaneous:
- Couldn’t handle an invalid feed.
- Consistently marked one feed as unread after each refresh, even though there was no new content.
- Overall: It’s okay, but I think there are better. Wait for this one to mature a bit.
MiNews
- First impressions: Looks pretty slick, but they obviously don’t understand that blindingly bright blue is more distracting than pretty. It didn’t import my groups, so I had to reorganize my feeds after importing them, but I only have to do that once.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- While it’s updating, you can’t mark any items as read. So if you’re trying to use it and it starts a refresh cycle, then you’re SOL.
- Doesn’t automatically mark read articles as read when you read them – only when you click on the link (which opens in their built-in browser). Instead, Cmd-Return is the “Next article” command that has the expected behaviour.
- Growl support: Nonexistent.
- External browser support: It doesn’t open links in Safari by default, and you can’t do it from the keyboard. You have to click a button (gasp!). Annoying.
- Miscellaneous:
- The preview pane isn’t styled, at all. It renders the text in (shiver) Times New Roman.
- It has the annoying habit of periodically resetting one feed to show all items as “unread.”
- Overall: Not bad considering it’s free, but I wouldn’t pay money for it.
NetNewsWire Lite
- First impressions: Looks pretty enough and simple enough. Bear in mind that this is the “Lite” version. The paid version has many more features — just none I’m interested in.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- I like collapsable toolbars.
- You can read all articles using the spacebar.
- You can change the style of the preview pane, if you choose. Seems like a useless feature to me.
- No search feature, though it’s available in the paid version.
- Growl support: Nonexistent. You can hack something up with an Applescript if you’re using the paid version.
- External browser support: Works like a charm.
- Overall: I’d like it if it had Growl support.
NewsFire
- First impressions: I’ve been using NewsFire for years now, and I love it.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- You can read the entirety of all unread articles by using one button, spacebar. This is a feature I’ve sorely missed in many of these other news readers.
- The two-paned approach simplifies my life.
- Growl support: Perfect.
- External browser support: Perfect.
- Miscellaneous:
- It exports its feeds in a flat OPML file so that my carefully-created folder structure must be made anew when I import it in other applications.
- Doesn’t handle invalid XML at all. It doesn’t even tell you that there’s been an error, you’re just left there wondering why three of your feeds don’t have any content when you know they should.
- Again with poor error handling: I just now discovered that one of my friends took down her blog. NewsFire never mentioned the disappearance of the RSS feed, it just looked like the person hadn’t updated in a while.
- I discovered a glitch that allowed the formatting from one feed to be applied to all feeds viewed thereafter. I find light-grey text on a white background very difficult to read, especially when my monitor has the viewing angle of an ostrich.
- Overall: I love NewsFire, I do. But it has some glaring faults with the technical implementation of its XML parsing and display, not to mention its poor error handling. This is, of course, what prompted this little review.
NewsMac Pro
- First impressions: The interface is more complicated than it needs to be.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- “Next” (spacebar) doesn’t automatically expand the next group, making traversing large updates a real hassle. Then, in the “New Headlines” view which does away with the folders, there apparently is no “Next” command that works, at least not from the preview pane. You have to click back and forth between the list of headlines and the preview pane if you need to scroll to read any of the items.
- Growl support: Notifications are minimal at best: “All downloads complete.” even if there aren’t any new items.
- External browser support: Works just fine with an external browser, but doesn’t open the links in the background (which is how I happen to use my reader).
- Miscellaneous: It crashed. That’s actually not really the problem: it also reset pretty much everything that had been changed since it was opened, including new articles and articles marked as “read”. That’s just poor design. When it crashed a second time, I just didn’t want to deal with it any more.
- Overall: Not worth the money.
Pheeder
- First impressions: No support for groups/folders is going to make managing my large number of feeds much more difficult.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- Doesn’t actually support importing feeds in the normal sense.
- Doesn’t alert you when there are new feeds. It’s really more of an RSS browser of sorts than an aggregator.
- It’s possible to read every article in every feed and have none of them marked as “read”. There’s a “special” (i.e. unintuitive) way that you need to browse the articles to have them marked as read.
- You can select more than one feed, but even when all of them selected “Mark as read” only acts on one feed. Inconsistency!
- I haven’t been able to figure out how often it auto-refreshes, if at all, and there’s no option to set a refresh time. I always seem to have to manually refresh it. This kind of defeats the purpose of an RSS reader, in my opinion.
- Growl support: Nonexistent.
- External browser support: Opens in its builtin browser; you have to use the contextual menu to open it in an external browser.
- Overall: I think it’d be acceptable for someone with a small number of feeds who doesn’t care about getting their news as soon as it’s available, but for me it’s no good.
PixelNews
- First impressions: Well, it looks sharp enough. “Channels” appear to be the equivalents of “groups” in this case. Except, they’re a pain in the ass to manage. In fact, I still haven’t figured out how to get my feeds into appropriate “channels”. From what I can tell, I can’t move a feed between channels once I’ve added it, meaning that to organize them properly, I’ll have to manually add all 27 of them.
- It crashed while trying to add a feed. Lost all changes made since I opened it.
- It crashed again as I was just about finished adding all my feeds. That’s too much. It’s cut.
- Simple and intuitive interface: Since I terminated the test prematurely, I only have a few points:
- There’s too much going on here. Can’t I just read my feeds? Very frustrating.
- There appears to be no way of moving feeds between channels, or any really good way of seeing individual feeds.
- Growl support: Nonexistent.
- External browser support: Since I couldn’t get my feeds added to it, I never found out.
- Overall: Even if they could eliminate flake factor, they still that a problem with the UI. Not worth your time.
Postino
- First impressions: Feels like a breath of fresh air. Importing was a breeze (I just did it straight from NetNewsWire).
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- Sports a clean and uncluttered interface. Things work like they’re supposed to.
- I can even hide the toolbar if I want to. I mostly use keyboard shortcuts, so I love that feature.
- It doesn’t seem to update its dock icon very often, so the number of new articles that it reports there is inaccurate. This isn’t a big problem, but it means I can’t easily tell when there are new articles.
- The ‘Directory’ of RSS feeds is nicely integrated.
- There is no easy way to jump to the next unread article. One must scroll through searching for them.
- Growl support: Nonexistent.
- External browser support: Uses an internal browser, but I can use Safari via the contextual menu.
- Overall: If you don’t need Growl (like I do), then this one’s a solid contender.
PulpFiction
- First impressions: It’s an RSS client&ndahs; no, it’s a mail client– no, it’s… I’m not entirely sure.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- I’m really not sure how to use this program. It’s definitely not what I’m used to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
- Interface is clean, uncluttered, and very Mac OS X.
- Growl support: You can set up a filter to alert you of items that match specific criteria. Not quite what I’m looking for, but interesting.
- External browser support: Supports it straight up. There’s an option in Preferences for it, and I can even set it to open in the background (a feature I love and miss from NewsFire).
- Overall: If “RSS items are really just like emails, right?” sounds like you, then this is the one to go for. Me, I’ll stick with something a little less… different.
RSSOwl
- First impressions: It doesn’t look completely native, but neither does it look as ugly as most Java applications. There are a lot of buttons with ambiguous icons.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- It has no way of communicating that new messages have arrived, not even via its icon.
- I find myself manually refreshing it, even though I’ve set it to refresh all feeds every 15 minutes.
- There are buttons that have no corresponding command in the menu, and no corresponding keyboard shortcut.
- It consistently marks some articles as unread every time i refresh, even though they’ve definitely been read. This only really started after it crashed, though, so it’s possible that it isn’t its normal behaviour.
- Growl support: Nonexistent.
- External browser support: Supports an external browser, although clicking on a link within an article still uses the builtin browser (inconsistent!).
- Miscellaneous: It crashed on me, randomly, losing all changes made since it was opened.
- Overall: No go for me. There are much better Mac-native RSS readers out there, why bother?
Shrook
- First impressions: I’m not entirely sure why they need four panes, but they’ve got ‘em.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- You can navigate through all unread articles with the spacebar. This is one of my favourite features that I miss from NewsFire.
- Having four panes just wastes screen real estate, in my opinion.
- Not sure what it means to “expire” articles except that unread articles get a blue dot instead of a yellow start.
- Growl support: Supported. Has per-feed options, too, so you can have them show up differently.
- External browser support: Supports an external browser by default.
- Miscellaneous: Had it lock up on me, making me force-quit it.
- Overall: It’s okay, but not great. The interface needs some prettying up.
Strider
- First impressions: I’ve gone from “channels” to “bookmarks”.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- The buttons they use on the brushed metal looks very… well, ugly. Not Mac OS X. Not impressed. There’s actually an option to turn off the brushed-metal look. Much better.
- Can navigate through all unread messages with the spacebar. Mmmmm…
- Growl support: Supports Growl, with options for per-headline or per-feed updating.
- External browser support: Supports Safari just fine, though it still uses its builtin browser when I click on links within an article (as opposed to opening the article itself).
- Overall: Actually not a bad piece of software. Needs a little more polish, though.
Vienna 2
- First impressions: Looks much like NetNewsWire with brushed steel.
- Simple and intuitive interface:
- More or less the same as everything else, which is nice. However, if you’re space-barring through your feeds and you change the focus to the article pane, the spacebar no longer works properly. How frustrating.
- Little problem with keyboard shortcuts (see “Miscellanea”).
- Growl support: Supports Growl, but only alerts you once it has finished its refresh cycle. No per-feed or per-headline alerts.
- External browser support: Works perfectly. Love it.
- Miscellaneous:
- The “activity” window is really nice. But hey, I’m a big nerd.
- Brushed steel. That’s so 2004.
- I miss my per-feed options.
- Overall: Decent overall, with a few problems.
Notes
A note on keyboard shortcuts
If you’re going to make keyboard shortcuts available, why not use the same shortcuts as Finder and other Apple applications? Why does “New Folder” have to be Cmd-Shift-F instead of the Finder’s Cmd-Shift-N? Choosing keyboard shortcuts that are consistent with the system’s standards makes using an application so much easier to use, and decreases the learning curve significantly. When I make a new folder, I should already know how to do it; I shouldn’t have to think, “Hmm, which program am I in? Okay, now how does this program create a new folder?”
A note on crash recovery
Something that Microsoft discovered a long time ago: applications will crash, regardless of how talented your programmers. That’s why the Office suite supports document recovery. Most of the news readers I crashed some point, and most of those lost anything that had changed since it had opened: added feeds, articles marked “read”, folder hierarchy, etc. It’s frustrating enough to have to reimport my feeds from the OPML file after every crash. I probably would have gone out of my mind if I had to go to all 30-some sites and grab their RSS feeds again.
A note on the handling of invalid feeds
“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” (Postel’s Law)
Blogging software should do its darndest to create valid feeds. RSS aggregators should do their darndest to display whatever invalid crap the blog is throwing at it. If this was an ideal world, all feeds would be valid. This isn’t, and they aren’t. Don’t take it out on the users.
A note on terminology
I am aware of the existence of Atom. However, I find it easier to say “RSS” than “RSS or Atom”. If you wish, you can copy this article into a text editor and do a find/replace on “RSS” with “RSS or Atom”. Just make sure you don’t try reading this paragraph afterwards, it won’t make any sense.
Conclusion
Using Mac OS X, I’ve been spoiled by good UI. Most Mac developers understand the importance of user-centred design. Unfortunately, it would seem that few of the people that made these RSS readers have given it much thought. Still, what’s usability if the application doesn’t work from a technical stnadpoint? Why does there seem to be a tradeoff? Why can’t a program both work well and be well-designed?
Stop whining, Aidan. Even the worst Mac OS X program is better than 90% of Windows or Linux programs.
Here I’ve broken the RSS readers into three very subjective categories:
- NewsFire is recommended (just missing proper error handling).
- NetNewsWire is recommended (just missing Growl).
- Postino is recommended (just missing Growl).
- Feed is okay.
- MiNews is okay.
- Shrook is okay.
- Strider is okay.
- Vienna is okay.
- Endo is not recommended.
- NewsMac Pro is not recommended.
- Pheeder is not recommended.
- PixelNews is not recommended.
- PulpFiction is not recommended (unless the whole email paradigm appeals to you).
- RSSOwl is not recommended.
I’d like to make one last point: the way I use RSS is very, very simple. When there’s an update, I go through it quickly, opening any interesting articles in a background Safari window for later perusal. Nothing fancy. Some people get a bit fancier with their feeds. Even I have started to play around with “smart feeds”, a feature only found in certain of the above programs but that I haven’t discussed here. So what’s my last point? Your mileage may vary. If you feel I’ve been unfair, please leave a comment!
As for me, I’ve come crawling back to NewsFire, tail between my legs. Hopefully its bugs get worked out soon. In the meantime, I’ll just have to deal with its craptastic error handling and inability to cope with invalid feeds.
