NewsFire 1.0 and random newsreader ramblings February 5th

one of the more recent additions to the Mac OS X newsreader heaven, has taken the magical One Point Oh hurdle only days after shifting the licensing to "Shareware" (which was announced  the day the first betas went public though). The rather short changelog for this build indicates, that the application has had its edges softened well in its 7 months public beta cycle.

I’m kinda back and forth on my newsreader choosing. I more or less started out as a late adopter of the RSS business (for whatever reason) with Freshly Squeezed Software’s PulpFiction in July last year.

On my way incorporating all sorts of new feeds into my collection I quickly concluded that PulpFiction was getting slower and slower each day. Today, I don’t even like its interface anymore. Sigh, times change.

Next up were the the NetNewsWire 2.0 beta releases. NetNewsWire 1.0 has been, as most of you know, the newsreader for Mac OS X. It’s been first, it’s been feature complete, it’s been everywhere. I didn’t like the 1.0 series at all though. Much too clunky, way too slow.

But that was over when I saw the 2.0 betas emerging. Brent did an amazing job overhauling the interface, rewriting some (most?) of the internals, giving the application a fresh usability. I was hooked.

But every now and then I saw a new release of NewsFire popping up at the usual places and I gave it a try.

Looking over the release history from version 0.1 to 1.0 is like fast forwarding through the release history of any other application. David produced new releases within days from the previous, adding functionality, fixing bugs while still focusing on the main application concern: minimalism.

Minimalism is still the core feature of NewsFire. There’s no built-in weblog editor (others do their job just fine). There’s no built-in webbrowser (again, others do just fine here). But NewsFire hooks up nicely to external apps. It’ll open tabs in your browser in fore- and background for articles you want to read in full, it’ll fork the current news item over into your weblog editor for posting.

No matter what size a monitor you have, NewsFire can run just as big and as small as you like, while still providing a usable at-a-glance view into your feeds. Smart folders are right there to assist distilling signal from noise. Flagging articles remembers them for future posting on your blog or forever bookmarking via del.icio.us.

In the meantime, NetNewsWire continues its 2.0 beta cycle. Recently b22 emerged over at Ranchero Software, adding Bloglines support, performance enhancements and bugfixes. It also comes with dum dum dum animated subscription sorting. Now, where did I notice that before? Running NNW with its toolbars hidden reveals additional similarities.

For now, NewsFire is my designated newsreader of choice although NetNewsWire definitely has many more features. The .Mac sync feature coming in 2.0 final will be tempting to say the least. Anyone reading feeds using more than one machine will certainly appreciate that.

I’d also wish NewsFire would provide a way to navigate to a specific newsitem in the list using the keyboard. As far as I can tell, you can either click the mouse on the item in question or spacebar through all the unread items in a feed until you get where you want to go.

Enough rambling for a Saturday morning already!