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Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

#1
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10/7/07 at 2:40am
  • Joined: July 1997
  • Post Count: 21,237
For the longest time I pretty much ignored the RSS Feed craze!
I never had the motivation to download a news reader and rely
on the simplicity of RSS feeds compared to browsing the web.

Out of sheer boredom this morning, I decided to look into
a RSS news feed program. After all, Home Theater Forum has
its own RSS feed and I figured it would be cool to check it out.

After doing a bit of research, I found that one of the best RSS
news readers for the MAC was a FREE program called Vienna.

Installation was a breeze as was subscribing to various feeds.
In a very short time I had the latest feeds from Yahoo, Associated
Press and various other favorite websites. Imagine all that
information available to me at a quick glance!

Mac users will want to add these various feeds to their reader.
Ronald J Epstein
Home Theater Forum co-owner
Email me at: repstein@hometheaterforum.com 
To View My Massive DVD Collection Click Here
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#2
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10/7/07 at 8:57am
  • Joined: March 2001
  • Location: Rochester, NY
  • Post Count: 6,867

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

Likewise I've never understood what RSS was for or why I should care. So I'll give this a go

You might want to try Growl, if you haven't yet. I noticed it works with Vienna, popping up little Outlook-like visual notifiers when Vienna found new articles.
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#3
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10/7/07 at 9:06am
  • Joined: July 1997
  • Post Count: 21,237

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

Dave,

This time I am one step ahead of you. I have been using GROWL
for quite some time. It's so cool how that notification program
integrates itself with just about everything you use.
Ronald J Epstein
Home Theater Forum co-owner
Email me at: repstein@hometheaterforum.com 
To View My Massive DVD Collection Click Here
HTF Rules and Regulations
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#4
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10/7/07 at 9:31am
  • Joined: March 2001
  • Location: Rochester, NY
  • Post Count: 6,867

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

I've only had Growl in for a day now, but it's neat how it just works with various programs. But I'm just now seeing what it does and if it suits my work style. What I really need is Growl with Audio: if I'm running a lengthy FTP upload, I'll go do something else in the house. I want Growl to "shout" at me when the FTP is done

Ok, so I've deleted the RSS-es from Vienna I don't want and have a new list of things to peruse.
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#5
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10/8/07 at 6:09am
  • Joined: May 2002
  • Post Count: 3,596

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

RSS is pretty useful, I use it with my iGoogle page, and also in Thunderbird.

CJ

And then when I feel so stuffed I can't eat anymore, I just use the restroom! And then I CAN eat more!

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#6
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10/8/07 at 8:12am
  • Joined: March 2001
  • Location: Rochester, NY
  • Post Count: 6,867

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

I've now found that RSS feeds can lag website content by hours. That's a bummer. This will be most useful to me in finding new content in busy websites like MacWorld and for telling me somethings up at sites I go to rarely (and would otherwise forget).
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#7
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10/9/07 at 4:57pm
  • Joined: December 1999
  • Location: where ever my wife lets me, Mostly near Philly
  • Post Count: 11,583

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

rss feeds?

growl?

what is growl?
and why do i already have it running on my mb
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#8
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10/9/07 at 6:56pm
  • Joined: March 2001
  • Location: Rochester, NY
  • Post Count: 6,867

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

RSS =
Quote:
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
Instead of checking websites to see if there's new articles, the RSS reader checks for you and keeps a list of bookmarks to the new content.

Growl =
Quote:
Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.
(It's like the New Message popup from Outlook, except for many other apps like iTunes and Cyberduck.

No idea why Growl would already be on your MB.
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#9
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10/9/07 at 10:37pm
  • Joined: April 1999
  • Location: Calgary
  • Post Count: 1,466

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

if you run Adium, it will try and install Growl. if you missed it, you could have downloaded it and not known.

Growl lodges itself at the bottom of your system preferences control panel...
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#10
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10/9/07 at 10:38pm
  • Joined: April 1999
  • Location: Calgary
  • Post Count: 1,466

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

btw... why do we need an extra program to tell us when a website has updated?
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#11
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10/10/07 at 5:59am
  • Joined: March 2001
  • Location: Rochester, NY
  • Post Count: 6,867

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

The idea, I think, is that you only want to go to a website when you know there's an article to read. Instead of going to the newstand every hour to look for a newspaper, which might not be available, the newspaper is delivered to your door when there are articles to read. If you monitor many websites, especially ones you check infrequently, I can see this being a useful tool.

That said, I uninstalled Vienna. This solution doesn't quite fit my "work" style -- RSS feeds don't help me much. A real negative for me is that Vienna repopulates listings I've already examined and deleted, confusing me as to what I have and have not read.
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#12
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10/10/07 at 8:46am
  • Joined: September 1999
  • Post Count: 762

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

Vienna is pretty nice. I'm trying it out. I've been using Opera's RSS/Atom feeder.

Daryl L 
MacBook Pro 2.4GHz C2D
2GB Ram, 160GB HDD
15" LED Glossy Widescreen
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB GDDR3 Vram

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#13
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10/21/07 at 4:51pm
  • Joined: March 2001
  • Location: Rochester, NY
  • Post Count: 6,867

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

Now introduced to RSS feeds, I've found that Firefox's innate handling of RSS feeds as smart bookmarks useful. And I find that easier than using a secondary program.
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#14
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10/22/07 at 6:39am
  • Joined: February 2001
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Post Count: 1,706

Re: Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE!

I was going to say -- what pushes users away from Safari's RSS handling? I like saving searches of some feeds and letting those notify me in my bookmarks bar.
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