Bill Brown bio photo

Bill Brown

A complicated man.

Twitter Github


NetNewsWire is great and definitely a pioneer in the Mac OS X aggregator field, but I think Shrook is poised to kick it to the curb. Granted, it’s about $19.95 more than NNW Lite but it’s got some great features already and the planned features look even better.

What I Like:
<ul><li>Date view of feeds</li><li>The idea of distributed feed checking: I think this and the ability to support gzip could end the bandwidth-sucking outcry about RSS</li><li>RSS View and Web View</li><li>Individual feed preferences</li><li>Timestamps</li><li>The ability to open an RSS view and have the Web view load behind it</li><li>Quick and easy NetNewsWire subscriptions import</li></ul>
What I Don’t Like:
<ul><li>That icon, bleh!</li><li>Channel Guide on the right side, make it a preference</li><li>UI can get a little cluttered</li><li>Plenty of spinning beach balls, which I think will go away over time</li></ul>
I’m going to evaluate this some more and see if I like it. If I do, then I’m buying. At the very least, this will serve as a wake-up call to Brent Simmons: there’s some competition, they’ve got WebKit, and they don’t care about enabling blog editing from the app.