Reading RSS feeds
I’ve written here before how great NewsFire was. Its wonderfully uncluttered interface lets you focus on what really counts: the feeds you’re reading. It is by far the most intuitive and elegant newsreader, and one of the most elegant Mac applications ever.
Now, its creator wants twenty bucks for it. As of version 0.9, you can no longer add new feeds to the application without registering and paying. (You can still add feeds to an earlier version, however, and when 0.9 starts up it will use them, so that’s a pretty simple way to circumvent that restriction. Keep an older version handy!) Twenty bucks for an app that’s not left Beta status yet and crashes several times a day? (Since you’re not producing anything in it, it doesn’t really matter, except that you also lose what you’ve marked as read.) C’mon!
I guess I’ll wait for the RSS integration in the next version of Safari. I’ve also tried Sage, an extension to Firefox, which I’ve reluctantly promoted to default browser despite some really annoying shortcomings, but I just can’t warm to it, interface- and otherwise.
