NetNewsWire’s styles

One of the many wonderful features of the NetNewsWire RSS feed reader is how flexible it is for layout, fonts and colours. I prefer the widescreen view myself: three columns with subscriptions on the left, headlines in the middle and the full post on the right.

NetNewsWire allows you to set fonts and colours and so on for the various columns, and for the actual posts it provides a fine selection of stylesheets. My preference though is for Ollicle Reflex:

An evolutionary improvement on Flex. Makes use of the wonderful jQuery to help stretch what’s possible in a NewNewsWire style further again.

Features include:

• Optional black background (nice for images).
• Some small tweaks to the display of images.
• Fixed position news title now only appears when you scroll down the page.

So, what that means is that I can choose to set a black background for feeds that are image-rich, such as Cute Overload, the Daily Puppy, Dilbert comics and the Astronomy Picture of the Day, while leaving the background for other feeds white.

But one of the best features is that Ollice Reflex resizes images to fit the available space in the column. If I want to enlarge the image I just drag the column divider to the left. This works very well for the Dilbert comic, for example, and for the astronomy pictures.

There’s a small glitch though that can catch you out. In order for Ollicle Reflex to work its magic you must set the NetNewsWire preferences correctly: make sure you enable Javascript in the Browsing > News items tab.