NetNewsWire - an RSS feed reader for your Mac
December 22, 2008 by Sukrit Dhandhania
NetNewsWire is a free RSS feed reader for the Mac. It is arguably one of the best feed readers around. I find to be one of the more useful applications on my Mac, and it’s one of the applications that I use first thing in the morning. It has a simple, clean, and well-designed user interface. Let’s check it out.
Head over to the NetNewsWire project website and download the latest release. After the download completes the “dmg” image file you downloaded should mount automatically and the installation should begin. After the installation is complete launch the application by going to the “Applications” directory on your Mac and double clicking on the NetNewsWire program.
As you can see in the image above NetNewsWire allows you to organize the feeds you subscribe to into folders. This can be quite useful when you find yourself subscribed to 150 feeds. It’s quite astonishing how much information you can end up with. So, take it from me, you want to organize your feeds.
First, let’s subscribe to a feed with NetNewsWire. There are two ways you can do this. You can manually add a feed URL into NetNewsWire, or you can tell Safari to use NetNewsWire as its default feed reader, which means that Safari will call NetNewsWire whenever you click on a feed link. Let’s begin with the first option.
Click on the “File” option in the NetNewsWire menu. Then pick the “New Subscription” option. You can also use the “Command + N” keyboard shortcut to do this. This will launch a window where you need to add the subscription URL of the RSS feed that you want to subscribe to.
After you enter the URL of the feed as shown in the example above you can choose which folder you want this feed to go into. After that click on “Subscribe” to complete the subscription procedure. Then wait for the feeds content to be pulled.
The second, and much more comfortable approach is to setup NetNewsWire as the default feed reader for you Mac. To do this launch the Safari web browser. In Safari’s menu click on “Safari” and then choose the “Preferences” option in the menu. In the Safari configuration window that launches click on the “RSS” tab. Here you will find an option to set the “Default RSS reader” for your computer. Click on the drop down menu and select “NetNewsWire”.
Close the Safari preferences window. Go to “http://www.simplehelp.net/” in Safari. Now click on the “RSS” button next to the search box.
This should launch NetNewsWire with the subscription window. Pick the folder you want to feed to reside in and click on the “Subscribe” button.
As I mentioned earlier, with time you are quite likely to end with way more feeds than you can handle. You can either unsubscribe to some feeds. What I prefer doing is to organize them in folders, which makes it easier for me to figure out which feeds I want to check out first. I have a folder for personal blogs, one for technology related news, one for general news, and so on. To create a folder click on the “New Folder” option and enter the name of the folder you want to create. After this you can drag and drop pre-existing subscriptions into the folder or you can chose to add a subscription to a folder at the time of subscription in the future.
This ought to get you off the block with NetNewsWire. You’ll soon discover some delightful features as you’ll go along. Before you know it, you’ll be so used to it you won’t want to use another feed reader.
Thank you for this tip. I checked it out and I love it, but after comparing it with my Google Reader I noticed that some of my feeds are only showing 10 items in netnewswire but there are 17 in google. Do you know how to change it so I can see every item in netnewswire?
Thanks.