Ranchero’s NetNewsWire 2.0

13 May 2005 · 0 comments

In the last year or two RSS News Feeds have become a very important way of keeping up with constantly changing web pages. More and more sites offer newsfeeds and you can track hundreds of sites easily with a good newsreader. Newsfeeds bring all the benefits of email with none of the spam and none [...]

In the last year or two RSS News Feeds have become a very important way of keeping up with constantly changing web pages. More and more sites offer newsfeeds and you can track hundreds of sites easily with a good newsreader. Newsfeeds bring all the benefits of email with none of the spam and none of the hassles attached to subscribing and unsubscribing.

You can view RSS feeds with Firefox, Opera and the version of Safari included with Tiger. Reading news in those applications is quite fun and may be sufficient for someone who want to track just one or two feeds. But if you start to track a half dozen feeds or more then you want a specialised newsreader. I keep an eye on about 150 websites each day.

Announced today: NetNewsWire 2.0 whose features include a tabbed browser, automatically downloading podcasts, smart lists, searching, flagged items, built-in switchable stylesheets and a dozen more coolnesses. The web page has details and screen shots.

I’ve been privileged to be a beta tester for the last year for this excellent application, and I use its companion Mars Edit for creating blog posts such as this one. I have half a dozen blogs I post to and it’s great to handle them all from this one point. Brent, the developer, uses an astonishing collaborative development approach which ensures the software incorporates the features users really want — even down to things like the colour of buttons, or whether there’s a margin beside a list. It’s not just the cosmetic details though, but the major features into which all the beta testers have had input.

You’d think that with this major release the developer would now be sitting back watching sales, but I happen to know that Brent is already considering what will be in the next update version.

I use a lot of software, for many different purposes. NetNewsWire is one of the best! Congratulations to Brent and Sheila for this huge update to superb software.

NetNewsWire Lite is free. NetNewsWire 2.0 costs US$24.95 for a single-user license and US$19.95 per person for multi-user licenses. It’s available bundled with MarsEdit 1.0 for US$39.95.

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