Valhalla Island

Before I jump into things I just want to mention how horribly crippled the trial of NewsFire is. Crippled trials are useless. I trial software and if by the time it expires I can’t live without it, I will buy it. I will never buy NewsFire.

That unpleasantness out of the way, on to the good stuff.So I might give you a little bit of a background. In fact, I definitely should give you a background. My journey into feed readers began a little while after I switched to Macintosh, I never used a feed reader on Windows. My very first was NetNewsWire Lite which I think may no longer be in development or supported.

The NNW Lite 3 pane Mail.app style layout.

I used NNW Lite for a long a long time and enjoyed it. It didn’t do much more than get and display my feeds and that’s what I wanted. It was also free. Never was I wishing it did something it wasn’t. Then I saw a screenshot of the 3 pane, side by side view in the full version of NetNewsWire. I downloaded the trial and instantly fell in love.

The 3 pane side by side or widescreen layout in NNW full version.

The 3 pane side by side layout was how feeds were meant to be viewed. It feels much more natural. Whoops, I forgot to mention, NNW Lite doesn’t offer the option for this kind of layout. NNW offers NNW Lite’s layout as well as the side by side (widescreen) and a combined view. If Lite offered the side by side layout I would have stuck with it.

So I upgraded to the trial of the full version using the new layout and I loved it. But by nature, trials run out and NNW’s did. I couldn’t live without it now, so I prepared myself for the rather steep USD$30. Before I forked out the money I wanted to try one more feed reader, the open source Vienna.

Vienna, I love you, thick borders and all

Vienna came to my wallet’s aid! It’s fundamentally NNW without the $30 price tag. Same brilliant layout with just a few small things that bother me. The interface definitely isn’t as polished as NNWs, the borders are thick, the buttons are awkward and you can’t see the feeds visually refreshing. Another annoyance is the number of unread feeds in the dock icon doesn’t update until it’s checked every feed in my collection, which can sometimes take quite a long time.

Otherwise it’s a lovely, free alternative to NetNewsWire and I couldn’t be happier.