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May 14, 2005
Impulse buy
I am not normally a person that makes impulsive purchases. Normally it takes days, if not weeks, of deliberation before I buy something. Yesterday I bought a piece of software less than twenty minutes after I heard about it. The software I bought was NetNewsWire 2.0. It is a weblog feed reader, for Mac OS X, that allows me to manage all the RSS and ATOM weblog feeds that I read regularly.
I found the software via a posting on Tim Bray's blog. The post was simple and direct:
It’s out; while I don’t see anything obvious that wasn’t there in the betas, that doesn’t make it any less neat. If you’re on Macintosh and you’re still using a Web Browser for most of your Web Browsing, stop doing that and go get this.
I went to the site, downloaded the 30 day trial, and launched the application. This is where I was first impressed. The application came preloaded with about 25 feeds, and these loaded almost instantly. Impressive. I then went to check out features. Did it support ATOM? It did. Did it allow grouping of feeds? Yes. Was it easy to add a feed? Oh yes, indeed it was. When the New Subscription menu item is selected, a little dialog box is opened with the contents of the clipboard pasted into the text field. It is highlighted, so a single key press will get rid of it. However, this feature makes adding feeds easy. My previous RSS reader was Thunderbird and it was painful to add feeds, so this was a definite selling point.
There were a few other features that impressed me. The software has multiple layouts, including a three column view, which is invaluable on the Mac, where screen space is scarce. It comes with a couple of really nice cascading style sheets, and it allows users to use their own. This will be another reason to fire up StyleMaster.
Purchasing was quick and easy via kagi.com. The license cost me $30, and that entitles me to all 2.x updates. It looks like my RSS reader needs are taken care of.
Posted by JohnC at May 14, 2005 11:36 AM