from the edge of the deep green sea

Having more and more RSS feeds (and less and less of a life ), Vienna has lately become too sluggish for me to use. Even if my processor usage was around 10%, Vienna would simply stall and go into beachball mode for quite some time. This can quickly become frustrating as I jump from RSS feed to RSS feed very quickly, and Vienna was lagging behind.

I decided to look for other alternatives and I stumbled on NetNewsWire – a $29.95 shareware app that so far has convinced me that the free alternative is not always the best one.

What I like most about this reader is the speed that it offers. I can quickly browser from RSS groups and it never lags behind – regardless of how many new articles are waiting. It has the typical OS X icon showing how many messages are unread (nothing new, yet good to have):

It also has some other features such as selecting the themes in which you want the feeds to be displayed. There are plenty to choose from to best suit your geeky needs.

One thing that I really like is the fact that it can synch up your RSS feeds using an FTP account. While at work, I check the same RSS feeds that I do from home, so when I get back from work, there are plenty of “unread” feeds that I have already looked at. By synching up my work and home feeds, I will get home and only have unread messages from actually those I have not yet read. Here is the preference panel for this feature:

Last but not least are the buttons from the toolbar:

The Next Unread and Mark All as Read buttons is where I get the speed to browse through feeds in no time. I’m still on day 1, but like I mentioned before, so far it has been great. Take it for a spin, you should really see the difference as when working with Vienna.