Lazycoder

Why I dumped NetNewsWire for Google Reader

Sadly, NetNewsWire is just collateral damage. But this is an example of how tying your application to an online strategy can be a good and bad thing.

I’ve been using NNW for a while, ever since I bought my iBook G4. I was happy when NNW was purchased by Newsgator. It meant that synchronization would be coming. I could happily read my subscriptions at work, and not have to manually mark the feeds I’d read as “read” when I got home. Things were great in my news feed world.

Then I used Newsgator online. No way to selectively mark items as read and keep others as un-read. Bugs, one that bit me many times would happen when I clicked on a feed or folder, nothing would show up in the reading pane but all of the feed items would be marked as read. Bummer, now I have to go click “show all items”, wait for it to reload, then try to remember what I last read in the feed. I also wanted a way to listen to podcasts inline in my web-based feed reader, nope. Can’t really do that in Newsgator online. I downloaded Feedstation to try and manage my podcasts. My thinking being that it could synchronize my podcast list with Newsgator online, put them in a folder marked “My Podcasts” and then I could listen to them online. Well I can’t listen to them online and putting them in the “My Podcasts” folder requires me to click on each item to add it to the “My Podcasts” folder. Bleh! Newsgator also handled pages incorrectly. If you had a certain number of items in a feed, Newsgator splits them up into pages and tells you how many pages there are. But at the same time it marks all the items you view as “read”. When you click on the icon to go to the next page, Newsgator re-calculates the number of pages based on the remaining items. So, in effect, you never get off of page one. Overall, I had a much worse user experience using Newsgator online than I did Google Reader or NetNewsWire.

So if I’m looking for a way to synchronize my home and away reading lists, suddenly a pure online solution, like Google Reader, becomes my only choice. There is NOTHING wrong with NetNewsWire, it’s a great product that I still recommend to anyone who asks me about OS X based feed readers.

Google Reader, and Netvibes BTW, allow you to listen to podcasts directly in the browser window. Although Netvibes has the edge here, it puts the audio player up in the top of the window so you can continue to do other things in your tabs while it plays. Google Reader forces you to keep that feed item open while you listen to the podcast. Google Reader also allows me to view each title of my feed items and decide whether or not I want to read it yet.

Newsgator did everything right as far as moving my subscriptions to their online service, a free year of premium since I was a NNW user, except give me a great online application. Which sadly means that, since they are tied together, NetNewsWire goes by the wayside.