Hot-Rodding the Web with NetNewsWire Maybe NetNewsWire is old news to you, but I feel like I've stumbled out of a cave into a wondrous parallel universe. In the week I've been using it, NetNewsWire has radically changed how I track Web news.
This OS X-based news reader largely frees you from the browser with all its bedeviling pop-UpDownAround ads and Java-Flash pipe hogs. With its built-in lists of RSS-feed sites, NetNewsWire makes it easy to quickly build your custom feed list. I use and like Radio. But NetNewsWire handles some of the same tasks, such as subscriptions, more deftly. NetNewsWire doesn't replace Radio; it just drops a hot-rod under the hood.
Forget browsing through bookmarks. NetNewsWire scans your subscriptions at set intervals and uses three color-coded panes to present site changes in a quick-to-scan format. A list of updated sites appears in the first pane. Click one and the second pane displays site headlines. Click one that intrigues for a summary paragraph in the third pane. If that's still not enough info for you, the hyperlink can pull up your browser. But most times NetNewsWire's three panes provide all you want to know. Click, boom, peel rubber.
While I now use NetNewsWire to handle the monitoring load, Radio remains my Web publishing vehicle of choice. Porting content from the former to the latter is not as smooth as it should be. A soon-to-come NetNewsWire pro version may fix that. The current lite version is not glitch free: Sometimes I have to launch it four or five times to get it to "stick" but the time it saves you throughout the day makes that little bit of morning hassle worth it. And, hey, it's free.
John Braun's Aug. 12 column in Mac Observer does a good job explaining the particulars. If only I'd known about NetNewsWire then, instead of three weeks later.
4:29:29 PM 
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