News readers take the work out of Web browsing by delivering content from your favored Web web site directly to your desktop . This software program , base on RSS or Really Simple Syndication , compiles headlines from user subscription and present them in a convenient , clickable format .
There are several excellent RSS news readers ( also know as news collector or feed readers ) for the Mac ( Reviews , March 2005 ) . David Watanabe ’s NewsFire 1.0 is one of two newsreaders — along with Ranchero Software ’s NetNewsWire 2 — that I eagerly anticipated . NewsFire 1.0 does not disappoint : it is an excellent app at a great toll .
I like NewsFire ’s simple interface because everything worked as we forebode . Lists of feeds are displayed in a tower on the left , while article appear in a main window on the right wing . you could jump from clause to article by hit the distance bar ; hitting Enter will enter the article in your default entanglement web browser app . I would have preferred more option on how to exhibit feed — for example I ’d care to be able to set custom fonts and background .
Another with child feature is NewsFire ’s ability to write searches , which is extremely useful for finding all the news or weblog post on various items of interest , without have to continually search the Web .
Like many RSS readers , NewsFire has an automatic provender finder . enroll a land site ’s URL , and NewsFire will look for its feeds . This worked very well on the weblogs I examine . NewsFire found all three feeds bring out on Andrew Baio ’s popularWaxy.org , for example ; one more than I knew he published . But on enceinte sites , it run into job . NewsFire only attend for feeds directly connect from the URL you query . Since many news web site put out provender in subdirectories , and do n’t link to them on the chief page , NewsFire wo n’t find them when you query the top - tier domain name . For example , when we search “ www.washingtonpost.com , ” NewsFire failed to unwrap any of The Washington Post ’s 136 feed .
Macworld’s Buying Advice
NewsFire 1.0 is an excellent app and I extremely advocate it . It ’s a corking value compared to other RSS readers in its category , and I expect that it will only proceed to meliorate . Although it has a few minor hitches , none of these are deal - breakers .
