jclark.org/weblog

NetNewsWire

For some time I’ve been generally unhappy with news aggregators. When I first discovered the magic of RSS, I had not yet switched. I tried Amphetadesk. I was impressed with the idea of running the aggregator as a local HTTP server, and with the fact that it was written in Perl. I quickly found, however, that I wanted three-paned aggregation, and that there was no robust template for Amphetadesk to meet my needs. I looked around and stumbled onto (what was then) a new three-paned aggregator for Windows, Syndirella. At the time I happened upon it, it was still in early stages, and new features were being added constantly, as suggested my members of the Syndirella mailing list. It was just about perfect for my needs.

Shortly after I started using Syndirella, I switched. Unfortunately, Syndirella is Windows-only, written in C# and .NET - I would have to find another aggregator. I have at times looked at NewsMonster, unfortunately it still does not work with Firebird on OS X. I‘ve looked at a few other products, and settled on NetNewsWire Lite. I considered the full version, but it’s $39, while NNW Lite is free. According the website, here’s the difference in versions:

The Lite version does not contain all the features of the full version. Specifically, it doesn’t display dates, subjects, and creators, it doesn’t include the Combined View, Find command, Scripts menu, or the Services menu subscribe command. It also doesn’t include the weblog editor and Notepad.

Didn’t sound like a reason to spend $39. At the time, I didn’t have a blog, so the weblog editor and notepad features didn’t mean much to me. I could live without date, etc. And so I’ve used NNW Lite, but I haven’t been happy.

Number one complaint… the one that has kept me looking for a new aggregator: when viewing an entry containing a link, hovering the link does not provide any indication of the link title or url. I often use this information to decide if a link is worth visiting. This means that every blog entry with a link (only about 99.9% of blog entries) gets opened in a browser if I think I might want to follow a link. Why use a three-paned agregator if you don’t read the content in the aggregator? (Update: As reported in the comments by Xian, NNW Lite now shows this info in the status bar when you hover. Cool!)

Still, I kept reading how everyone just loves NetNewsWire. I didn’t get it. When I updated my RSS 2.0 feed to show include full content via xhtml:body, I found another limitation of NNW Lite… it doesn’t use xhtml:body. Instead, I only see the shortend . Now, I was pretty sure I had read somewhere that NetNewsWire supports xhtml:body. So, I went to the homepage to check it out. I noticed that you get 30 days free before you must pay for the full version of the app, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Guess what? I can now view feed content inside of xhtml:body. Not only that, but hovering a link inside a story shows the link title and url in the status bar. Well, what do you know.

Now I have to decide if I’m willing to pay for an aggregator… of which there are many free options. Just none I like. For now, I can say that these two features make NNW a far better product that NNW Lite… the two may as well not be from the same company.

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