Monday, October 03, 2005

this post is only for mac users who subscribe to rss feeds and use a dedicated piece of software to view them.

about 3 months ago i started having a problem. thunderbird began running really slow on my system for some reason and i didnt know why. it wasnt the ram, it wasnt the hdd, it was just slow. anyway, i was all for the open source stuff. i stand by it simply because in more cases than not, its extremely reliable, and has features real people use.

anyway, i didnt want to have all my rss feeds sitting in thunderbird and no way to transfer them...3 months later after much searching (there was uni, food and sleep in between search sessions :P) i finally discovered a way to export all my feeds using opml, something thunderbird doesnt support by default. so i installed it and tried other rss readers, like netnewswire, newsfire (which is the first one i used when starting with rss when it was still free in beta) and the like. all of them were good until newsfire went out of beta, and netnewswire became kind of sluggish. lately i have been using this new one, called vienna. it is free, i can do all the stuff i couldnt do in netnewswire, like search and flag news items. i can even still have smart folders to keep my feeds in etc.

i now use apple mail for my mail and vienna for my rss. if it were up to me, i would still use thunderbird for both, because to me it sems logical to check my rss while also checking my mail. but it has become a project that i think is becoming a bit too cumbersome in areas it shouldnt be, and hence slowing down.

everyone should definately try vienna. it has custom styling, is very very fast (even faster than netnewswire when refreshing feeds and viewing them) and has the added extras i enjoyed in thunderbird. and best of all, its free!


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