Terrific RSS Feed Reader for Mac...and it's FREE! (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

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.

 

[DaveF]

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.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

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.

 

[DaveF]

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.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

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

CJ

 

[DaveF]

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).

 

[TonyD]

rss feeds?

growl?

what is growl?
and why do i already have it running on my mb

 

[DaveF]

RSS = (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.

 

[McPaul]

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...

 

[McPaul]

btw... why do we need an extra program to tell us when a website has updated?

 

[DaveF]

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.

 

[Daryl L]

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

 

[DaveF]

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.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

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.