News Feeds

So here I am… a NetNewsWire lover with a dissatisfaction with NewsGator Online and NewsGator Mobile. I’m also a little disappointed with FeedDemon (which NewsGator bought as their Windows RSS client) which I use at my office. It’s close to NNW in features, but just not the same in the few ways I use NNW the most. I can’t view any aggregation that happens across all feeds — new items, flagged items, etc. I can’t do that from the mobile reader. I can do it from the web reader, however.

The experience itself is so dissimilar from app to app that what ends up happening is that I rely on the web and mobile clients the most. Even so, the web client can be slow, the views are stuck in a folder-only metaphor, and when viewing at folder levels, feeds that aren’t in those folders are somehow sneaking in. Saving an item makes the “clippings” folder look like there’s something new in it all the time, and there’s no way to make it look unread except for deleting the items themselves. The whole thing feels a bit buggy and off.

So relying on a web client basically means that I’m now seriously considering using Google Reader instead, since I’ve begun using Google Personalized Home instead of Netvibes (I know, I know, but Google’s page is just simpler, which is all I need from a “browser home” page). It’s just that I’ve never used the features that make a local client really worth having, such as keeping zillions of entries local, or reading when my laptop is off-line.

Also, when I needed my local client to auto-download files (re: “podcatching”), NNW would create a system of sub-folders for the files including a default, parent folder. That’s fine for most users, but the apps and scripts I use to folder-watch and act on new files don’t support that, so I ultimately ordered a copy of NewsFire, which auto-downloads everything into whatever folder you specify. Not to mention, these feeds are very few and specific to a single machine, so they don’t need to be integrated in a larger, always-synchronized source like NewsGator.

Now that NNW is subscription based, and it’s married to a NewsGator subscription, I can’t say that I’d pay for it again, which is sad, but I think I’m onto something here. When your needs change, it’s best to find new ways to best fill those needs, and not force old ways into new models.

Normally, I’d say I’ll miss using NNW, but I guess I already do, since I use a PC all day at work. Grrr.