NetNewsWire 3.1

Like many tech journalists, I'm an RSS-feed junkie. I subscribe to feeds--live-updated summaries of Web-site articles--for about 125 sites, and I browse those feeds multiple times each day to follow the latest news, watch for new product announcements, and generally keep myself in the tech-industry loop. So a newsreader--a program for organizing RSS-feed subscriptions and browsing and reading articles--is one of my most-heavily used programs. While there are a number of quality newsreaders for the Mac, NewsGator's NetNewsWire 3.1.7 (NNW for short) stands out for its extensive feature set, its easy-to-use interface, and its ability to sync your feeds across multiple devices. And it's free.

The basics

Once you set NetNewsWire as your default RSS reader (easily done from within Safari's preferences), you can add feeds to NetNewsWire--called subscribing--by simply clicking on an RSS link on a Web page or an RSS icon in your browser's address bar. You can also add a subscription within NewNewsWire by providing the URL or by using the program's handy Sites Drawer, which lists thousands of feeds from around the Web organized by topic area.

Your subscriptions--the feeds to which you subscribe--are displayed in a list on the left; the number of unread articles is displayed next to each feed. Selecting a feed shows, to the right, the articles in that feed; by default, unread articles appear bolded and in a different color. Selecting an article displays its contents--which, depending on the feed, can be nothing; a summary; or the entire article--in the preview area. In Traditional view, the preview area appears below the article list, similar to Mail's e-mail preview; in Widescreen view, shown here, the preview is on the right. There's also a Combined view, which displays each article below its title in a scrolling list.

Double-clicking an article title opens the full article on the source feed's Web site, in either your preferred browser or within NetNewsWire's own Web browser, depending on your settings. The built-in browser isn't as capable as, say, Safari or Firefox, but it's more than adequate for reading most articles, as it supports Flash, Java, JavaScript, plug-ins, and custom style sheets. Like most modern browsers, it also supports tabs; tabs can appear at the top of the browsing area or as thumbnails on the right side of the window.

You can also use your keyboard's arrow keys to browse your feeds: the left and right arrows move between the subscriptions list and the articles list; the up and down arrows are used to select a subscription in the subscriptions list or an article in the articles list. Pressing return opens the selected article (or, if no article is selected, opens the main Web site for the selected subscription).

You can choose which data is displayed for each list of articles--for example, the title, date, creator, and feed name--as well as how articles are sorted within each feed. You can also choose from among dozens of visual themes that determine how articles are displayed within NetNewsWire: the fonts and font sizes, layouts, colors, and more. I find that NNW's various layouts, display options, and controls make it much easier to browse feeds than using Safari or other feed readers I've tested.

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