burngreave.net

My thoughts so far on the various bits of software I've been playing with while experimenting with rss feeds. When I've got it all together, I plan to add this as a new section of the Mac notes page.

Mac OS 9
Amphetadesk
Free. Separate app which feeds to your web browser of choice. Worked OK under OS 9.2.2, but a bit buggy [especially when trying to quit].

bottomFeeder
Free. Applet for Visual Virtual Machine [a bit like Java]. Had quite a discussion with the developer who wasn't at all Mac savvy. Worked OK some of the time and then would inexplicable stop, very basic, very slow.

Mac OS X
Amphetadesk
Free. See comments above. Seems much more stable under Mac OS X.

bottomFeeder
Free. See comments above. Haven't tried it under OS X.

NetNewsWire
NNW Lite 1.0.3
free
min: Mac OS X 10.1.x
Used quite heavily. Very nice, but a few of its shortcomings did get quite irritating. I missed time and date info for incoming headlines. The checking options also seemed quite limited to me. Did the job and in my opinion the best of the free options.
NNW 1.0.2
$19.95, 30 day demo
min: Mac OS X 10.2
Same as NNW Lite plus date and author info, weblog editor, outliner.
Haven't used this but the date and author info were something I wanted. I think if I were to get seriously into blogging, I'd be using Nisus Writer for writing, just I use it for everything else. Not worth the extra money.

Shrook 1.0.2
$19.95 [shareware I think]. The software doesn't seem to be crippled in anyway, so it might be a time expiry deal. I'll update if I found out.
min: Mac OS X 10.2
I really like this piece of software. It does everything NNW Lite does, plus provides date and author info, has more flexible scheduling options, and has a cool drawer visual widget that shows the rss feeds in reverse chronological order. This is really useful [and fits in with the way I read email for example]. Also imports NNW lists, which was very useful when I running both at the same time to compare.

If I had some money I'd buy it!