First, Merry Christmas! Now, my "bah humbug"!
I despise adware. Its not that it is evil, in and of itself. Its just that, well, it is irritating to be exposed to someone's attempt at persuading me that I need to buy something. Look, if I have a need for something, it is quite simple to research the existing products that fulfill that need, decide and make the purchase. Do we really need to put up with the corporate propaganda stream just to use otherwise "free" software?
Since NetNewsWire switched their model to adware, I'd been looking for something to replace it. Why didn't I just pay the fee to remove the ads, you may ask? Because Newsgator doesn't offer that option. Nope, if you want to use NetNewsWire you must eat their adstream while doing it.
I had used Vienna before. It wasn't as polished then, but they have done some great work and now it is, for my needs, every bit as good as NetNewsWire. The fact that it isn't adware made the choice simple. The interface is simple and clean and serves my purposes very well.
Some features:
- Subscribe to Atom/RSS news feeds and podcasts.
- Simple and intuitive user interface with customisable toolbar.
- Built-in tabbed browser.
- Global search of all retrieved articles.
- Automatic detection of newsfeeds on web pages.
- Smart folders for organising related feed articles.
- Custom article display styles.
- Three separate reading layouts.
- Blogging integration.
- Support for downloading enclosures in articles
- Filter the displayed articles.
- Manual reordering of the subscription list.
- Full AppleScript support.
- Localised into several languages.
So if you are tired of being forced to eat ads while reading your RSS feeds, switch to Vienna. You'll be glad you did.
Tags: adware, vienna, netnewswire, newsgator, rss readers, feed readers
