Newsfire is just the latest in the growing trend of free offline RSS readers available for the Mac. No feature restrictions, no ads, no cut-down 'lite' version. "After much internal debate, I've made the decision that as of today, NewsFire is totally free. Small Dog does have a number of useful RSS feeds, which you can view and subscribe to by clicking here.Coming hot on the heels of the 1.5 release, Dave Watanabe's popular RSS reader, NewsFire is now free.
Note: This is not a product sells or receives commission from, it’s simply a Mac-friendly service that I’ve found very useful. There is also a version of NetNewsWire for the iPhone / iPod touch, which you can read about by clicking here. Once your account with Newsgator is active, input your account setting in NetNewsFire.
It’s all free all you have to do is download the latest version of NetNewsFire ( by clicking here), and create an account at Newsgator ( by clicking here). My RSS subscriptions are finally in sync. When I add a new subscription in the web-based reader, it appears in the desktop-reader. When I mark an item as read in the desktop reader, it shows as read in the web-based reader. That’s when I discovered NetNewsWire’s killer feature: the ability to sync their desktop reader with Newsgator’s web-based RSS reader. That meant my subscriptions were always out of sync. However, I’ve never gotten in the habit of using Safari or Mail to read RSS.Īgain, my preference is to use a desktop RSS reader, but I often needed to check my RSS subscriptions at work or while traveling via Google Reader. For many people, the Mail application is active all day. The idea is great – read your email, then scan your RSS feeds.
In Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, both Safari and Mail offer the option to subscribe to RSS feeds. Applications With Integrated RSS Readers. The disadvantage is that web-based readers tend to have fewer management options than desktop readers, are often somewhat harder to read.ģ. The advantage of web-based RSS readers is that you have universal access to your feeds from any web-connected computer. Google Reader and Bloglines are the most popular.
Web-based RSS Readers Web based RSS readers offer a single webpage where you can follow subscriptions to dozens of websites. Cyndicate and Vienna are other popular desktop RSS readers.Ģ. Previously I used the excellent (and well designed) NewsFire which would be my favorite reader but for NetNewsWire’s killer feature. I use NetNewsWire for reasons I explain below. They’re fast and easy to use, and can even be rather elegant. They scan your RSS subscriptions for freshly updated content, which you can then browse directly in the desktop RSS reader. These are stand-alone applications that you launch like any other program on your Mac. RSS readers basically come in three varieties:ġ. You can subscribe to a site’s RSS feed in an RSS reader, which makes following dozens of favorite websites as easy as checking email.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s basically a way for websites to announce and distribute recently updated content, including full or summarized text and images. Some of this information is trivial, but some is important for staying up-to-date, creative, and connected. RSS has made it much easier for me to stay up-to-date with the massive amount of ever-changing information published on the web. I’ve been a fan of RSS feeds since the early 2000s, even before the distinctive orange RSS badge began appearing on RSS-enabled websites, and way before Safari or Mail featured built-in RSS readers.