NewsFire - a Great Atom/RSS Feed Reader for Mac OSX - Now Free!

Everybody these days supports RSS and Atom feeds. Go to a page in Firefox or Safari and if that page has a news feed, you'll see a little icon appear in the address bar. Click on that, and assuming how your system is set up, either of those browsers will offer to track that feed for you, and update you when new news items appear. It's a great way to keep up-to-date on news (and your friends' blogs, of course).

I prefer a standalone reader for reading my Atom/RSS feeds, simply because I like the idea of using a single program to solve a single need. I don't necessarily want my web browser to do everything for me (although they're getting so that they can!). I've been using a program called NetNewsWire, which is free, but recently a program called NewsFire - which had previously been shareware - was released as freeware. I decided to take another look at it, and for the most part, I like what I saw.

First, NewsFire has a really nice interface. It's simple, allows users to navigate through their feeds without ever taking their hands off the keyboard. It's pretty nice. You can view either the headline of an article or the full feed, and clicking a headline will take you to the web page in your default browser. I've used web browsers that can display HTML right in the same window (which means you don't even have to use your web browser), and that's great as well, but I've come to like using the feed reader (like NetNewsWire or NewsFire) to read the feeds, and then my web browser when I want to read full articles and comments. It would be a nice touch (and easy to implement as well), if NewsFire supported this, but it's not a big deal that it doesn't.

One area where NewsFire really shines is in its ease of use. If you know of a web page that has a feed, but don't want to take the time to find out the exact feed address, just type in the main page address in NewsFire, and it will scan the page and find the feed for you. That's a pretty nice touch. Of course, if you have NewsFire set as your default feed reader, simply clicking on the RSS icon in the menu bar of your browser will accomplish the same thing, but I like that NewsFire can do it on its own.

NewsFire is also customizable in how it behaves. Want to see just the headline of an article, or the headline and the summary? No problem. Want to immediately view full feeds in your web browser, or have them open in the background? No problem. You can even set NewsFire so that it uses all sorts of neat visual effects, such as sliding feed lists, which always put the newest feeds at the top, as well as having the main window fade away to transparency, when it hasn't been used for a while. You can also adjust NewsFire so that it displays items in the size font you want, and highlights items in the color of your choice. NewsFire supports sounds as well, and can play a sound file whenever a new item is available to read, as well as displaying the number of unread items in the NewsFire Dock icon.

Many blogs these days include attachments, such as videos and audio files, and NewsFire can download them for you, as well as integrate itself with the rest of your computer. For instance, you can set NewsFire to automatically play any audio/video content after downloading, as well as automatically add it to your iTunes Library. And if you have a blog of your own, or are into the whole social networking "thing," you can tell NewsFire which blog poster you use (it supports ecto, Feeder, MarsEdit or ecto), as well as which del.icio.us bookmark application you use (it supports either Cocoalicious or Pukka).

Finally, and this is a great feature for those with a lot of feeds, NewsFire supports the creation of folders for your feeds. This is nice because now, instead of having a list of maybe 30 or 40 items, all in a single, flat list, you can create folders and put the feeds in each folder by category. For instance, I have roughly 35 feeds I read each day, but I only see 4 folders - Comics, Computers, Entertainment and Politics. This allows me to read only items in a certain category simply by clicking a folder, or I can click the "New Items" entry in my feed list, and view only the new items. It's pretty nice.

All in all, I really like NewsFire. At the moment, it still isn't my feed reader of choice, but only because I use both Mac OSX and Linux, and NewsFire doesn't provide a way to synchronize my feed lists between the two (and NetNewsWire does, via NewsGator.com), but if I was using but a single operating system, NewsFire would be a strong contender for my favorite blog reader. About the only thing I can think of to gripe about - besides not being able to sync between computers - is that even though the program is released as free, it comes subscribed to a few news feeds I don't want. And while it's possible to delete them from my list, it isn't possible to delete the blog feed of the NewsFire author. If I could do that, and get synchronization options, it would be perfect. As it is, I'd still recommend it, but not quite as highly. If you'd like to download your free copy of NewsFire, head over to its home page and try it out for yourself.