Reading news feeds? Forget Safari. Forget Apple Mail. Instead, try out NetNewsWire: It sports a convenient user interface and an integrated web browser (via WebKit), need I say more?
I do not follow many news feeds, and after I switched
to MacOS X, I used to
use Safari's built-in feed reader. It was nothing to write home
about, but it has a simple user interface and worked well enough for
my modest needs. With OS X 10.5 Leopard
, Apple Mail
grew RSS support and I switched to it as default feed reader. I liked
that it was the same interface as for email, but some things were
rubbing me the wrong way. For instance, I created a Smart
Mailbox to get rid of already read feed items:
The main show stopper was that some feeds basically require to visit a web page (e.g., the BBC News feed contains only a one-sentence summary of the stories. When in Apple Mail, this causes a switch to the default Web Browser, and possibly a desktop switch as well (thanks to Spaces).
With NetNewsWire, the awkward application switching (and backswitching) is history. Now, if only it could also view PDF files inline (via PDFKit)...