That Syncing Feeling
I’ve written here a few times about RSS Readers both on the Mac and iPhone – and my quest in trying to find the one that does it all. I went from NewsFire to NetNewsWire then back again. Now it’s happening all over again.
After enjoying a long and happy relationship with NewsFire, I recently ran into problems where my feeds simply weren’t refreshing after upgrading to the most recent version. I’d look at the icon in the dock and wonder why it’s little green badge hadn’t appeared in hours to show me I had feeds to read, especially when it’s set to refresh every 5 minutes. Closing down the app and restarting prompted the downloads, but I’d find myself with almost 100 new articles awaiting my attention, not my usual easy-to-get-through bitesize chunks when arriving in a timely manner.
However, I wasn’t persuaded back to NetNewsWire for that reason alone. I’d have learned to live with NewsFire needing the occasional nudge because of it’s gorgeous UI and ability to auto refresh feeds less than just every 30 minutes, unlike NNW. No, my arm was finally twisted by Newsstand for the iPhone (my old review). It’s always been the most reliable and elegant RSS Reader on the iPhone, in my opinion, but the arrival of version 2.0 last night gave it the killer feature – Google Reader syncing. NetNewsWire now also syncs with Google Reader meaning that these two apps go together quite magically and beautifully.
As you can see by the above images, the Newsstand [£2.99 | iTunes Link] icon has been beautified even more, as has the app itself with the new carousel style flick through feeds. The only thing that would make this partnership even better is push notifications in Newsstand when new articles are available.
So, for now my RSS needs are being catered for by NetNewsWire on the Mac and Newsstand on the iPhone, with Google Reader syncing bringing them both together. It’s not the perfect solution for me as my heart still belongs to NewsFire for it’s beautiful UI. I hope our paths will cross again, hopefully when it’s own iPhone app is available with syncing.
NNW syncing to Google Reader does not work as well as you think.
From the NNW 3.2b web site (http://nnwbeta.com/todolist32.html)
20-item limit
NetNewsWire downloads 20 items per feed. This means unread counts can be out-of-sync, even if the items that NetNewsWire has are properly synced.
It’s easy enough to change the limit — but that doesn’t solve the real problem of getting all unread items. I’m sure there’s a way to deal with it.
I switched back to the NNW 3.1 release because the Google Reader sync was essentially useless for me. I get more than 20 update per feed.