Tuesday, September 14, 2004


NewsFire


After a couple of days of use, I’m really liking NewsFire. It’s only at version 0.21, so it has a few rough edges, but it does a whole lot of the little things right.

  • Excellent autodiscovery support. You can subscribe to feeds either by:

    1. Entering the feed URL directly.
    2. Entering a web page URL. It will suck down the page, find any feeds that are properly advertised in the <HEAD>, and scrape the HTML looking for feeds in pages that don’t.
    3. Telling it to look at the current displayed page in Safari, and goes through the process in 2.

  • Per-feed update intervals. There are still some minor nits, but it’s smart enough to use the information provided in the feed if it’s present.

  • Per-feed persistence settings. You can tell it whether or not to store old entries on a per-feed basis. In practice, this works great: I usually want weblog entries to be stored persistently, while things like weather feeds, BBC news feeds, and the like to be transient.

  • Humane interface. There’s very little clutter, just a two paned window with a list of feeds on the left and a space to display feed indexes and articles on the right. You can configure it to sort feeds either by newest content or most unread articles. In perhaps the coolest touch, it visually shuffles the feeds as new items comes in, with audible feedback.

  • Of course it does the basic things expected of every OS X aggregator: it uses Webkit for display, imports and exports OPML, supports all the extant RSS variants plus Atom, etc.

  • At least for now, it’s free.

addendum: I would strongly recommend not setting your refresh to 5 minutes for any site that you don’t personally run and pay the bandwidth bills for.

:: Dave Walker 15:06 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags:

:: Comments (4)

Comments:

KJ wrote:

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It looks great, it is fast and i like the fact that you can easily hook it up with Safari. I am really missing a way to order your feeds into folders though :(
d.w. wrote:

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The developer has mentioned that he’ll be adding “smart feeds” at some point down the line.
brian w wrote:

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Does it still have poll-every-five-minutes as its default setting? That was fairly annoying.
d.w. wrote:

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I didn’t delete and recreate prefs since installing the latest beta (0.22) to be sure, but I think that default is now a fairly sensible 2 hours, and it does etags and gzip and last-modified and all those other things modern, sensible newsreaders should be doing. In any event, I’ve set my default interval to 3 hours, and it’s smart enough (since 0.22) to defer feed updates when the machine is idle.



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