RSS is the Next Big Thing on the internet. Many sites have feeds and an RSS reader is going to make its way into Safari. Safari’s RSS reader sure looks nice, but it may not be for everyone. There are a good number of RSS readers out there, but relative newcomer NewsFire is the Gold Standard.

NewsFire is unlike any other newsreader out there. NewsFire starts with a clean interface--quite possibly the cleanest interface I’ve seen in a newsreader application. Consider the following, a screenshot from Ranchero’s NetNewsWire, a very good application in its own right.

Now look at NewsFire’s main window A good deal simpler? My goodness yes. Yet it has many of the RSS viewing features of NetNewsWire at a lower price.

But let’s focus on NewsFire. It’s pretty straightforward; you see an RSS feed entry and click on it to read more. When you click on the link, this is what you get.
Click the headline to view the original page the article appears on; click the snapback button to go back to the list of articles. That’s all; it’s that simple. In fact, it’s so simple that there’s no help system!

The interface isn’t just easy to use, it’s beautiful. And it’s not beautiful because it uses every trick in the book, it’s beautiful because it is clean and true to itself. The result is, well, it’s something you have to experience. NewsFire isn’t just a regurgitation of what is already out there; it is a unique, innovative approach and you can tell that the developer put some thoguht into it. NewsFire makes reading RSS feeds truely fun for everyone, beginners and geeks alike. It also has some nice features, such as “Smart Feeds,” which allow you to create your own aggregate feed out of items from the other feeds you subscribe to. You can also create groups of feeds, much like you can make folders of Albums in iPhoto 5. Very nice. Also, the “Discover feeds” commands (one which allows you to enter the URL, the other discovers feeds for the current site in Safari) makes discovering CSS way simple. No longer do you need to hunt around for the feed link on a given page; NewsFire does it for you.

A new feature in version 1.1 is the ability to find, listen to, and download Podcasts. The Podcast window is about as intuitive as the rest of the application, but it isn’t exactly obvious how to get podcasts listed in the podcast window. In fact, it may be a little too simple. Some feeds display audio files such as in this screenshot:

Click the “download” button to begin downloading the podcast file. It’ll show up in the Podcast Window and live there until you clear the list. From there, you can export it to iTunes. The only hang-up is that I expected the Podcast window to behave exactly like the main RSS window (that is, I expected to be able to add the feed and the available podcasts would appear instantly). Instead, it behaves more like the Safari downloads window.

If you haven’t given RSS a try, NewsFire is a great place to start. If you’re a seasoned RSS feed user, NewsFire will make RSS a new experience. If you’re on Tiger, NewsFire is a worthy alternative to Safari’s built-in RSS reader. Despite some unexpected behaivor, NewsFire is a high-quality application and is worth checking out.

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