Oceanside, Nevada

I have tried, I really have, to convince the people I know and love of the magic that is RSS. Magic that can only truly be experienced with an RSS reader. And there are a lot of RSS readers out there. Up until yesterday my hands down favorite was Newsfire. Then I downloaded the 2.0 version of NetNewsWire.

Wow. Seems like every few minutes I’m saying “hey, that’s cool.”

And it is, really. I had fiddled with NNW back in the day and was fairly unimpressed. It wasn’t really bad, per se, it was just more complex than I wanted to deal with at the time. I wasn’t blogging then, you see, so I didn’t really need a lot of the features that NNW had. I just wanted something simple and unobtrusive. Nothing satisfied until NewsFire came along.

Fast forward to podcasting. Podcasts, of course, are RSS enclosures. Most people use a podcatching client like iPodderX to download their podcasts and forward them on to iTunes (on the Mac, anyway. Can’t really speak to how PC users do it, but I imagine it’s not too different). So if you want to read your RSS feeds and automagically load your iPod with you need to have two different applications running.

As my boy likes to say, that’s silly.

If it were me, I would want to add podcatching abilities to the app I have open all the time anyway, my RSS reader. There are instances where people have tried to do just this. One was, I think, Poddum Feeder, but I’m not sure and I can’t access the website at the moment. It didn’t work so well but it was pretty immature in it’s development cycle. NewsFire could have been the perfect synthesis of RSS reader and podcatcher but the developer is of the opinion that podcasts and RSS readers don’t really go together. I read a statement from the developer to that effect in which he stated that he felt that Apple should integrate podcasting into iTunes. After much feedback on his blog, he did release an update to NewsFire that adds limited podcast support but it simply wasn’t enough for me to want to give up iPodderX. It’s a shame too, because I really like NewsFire and I’m not very fond of iPodderX. Granted, iPodderX is the best podcatching client I’ve tried, but it’s still awkward and buggy. IMHO, all a podcatching client needs to do is:

1. download podcasts into iTunes
2. automatically set the genre of the podcast and
3. delete the original file.

A really nice bonus feature is converting to bookmarkable AAC, something that only iPodderX does correctly right now AFAIK, but I can probably gin something up with Automator to do that.

Enter the new version of NetNewsWire. It’s a very feature rich and capable RSS reader and it does everything a podcatching client should do except conversion to bookmarkable AAC. There are a couple of nitpicky things I don’t like about it, but they’re pretty minor.

For one, NNW uses the venerable spacebar shortcut to move to the next unread message, which is pretty much the industry standard since, like forever. What puzzles me is the fact that it lacks the shift-spacebar shortcut to go back to the previously read message. It’s irritating when I’m reading quickly and accidentally go too fast to have to change my hand position to back up to something I overshot. Sounds minor, but when you read as much as I do, it matters.

The other feature I’d like to see would be the ability to set the genre of individual podcast feeds. For instance, right now I set the genre tag of all my podcasts to “Podcast” and then I use several smart playlists in iTunes to organize them. If I could set, say, The Dawn and Drew Show to “Podcast, Adult” and Coverville to “Podcast, Music,” I would be able to do some cool organizational things. It’s not a deal breaker, because I can do the same sort of thing on the back end with smart playlists, but it would be cool if I could do it in NNW.

I should mention that NNW has some other very cool features, like support for blogging clients, a capable integrated web browser and the ability to sync multiple copies of NNW for reading on two different Macs.

So, Mac using people whom I know and love, here’s your sign. Go download a copy of NetNewsWire and start to learn the joy of RSS and podcast listening, two great tastes that go great together.

Technorati Tags: computers, geek, Internet, iPod, Mac, RSS, puppy, technology

Tags: No Comments