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RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable

Thoro writes "There is an unusual interview with the authors of the five major RSS clients for OS X: NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsMac, PulpFiction and Shrook. Safari RSS, Apple, the hype around RSS and the role of the news aggregator in the future are discussed. It's also hinted that the performance problems of RSS may be overblown. It is a breath of fresh air to see so many competitors come together to talk civily and not to better gang up on another."

18 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Enough? by SilentChris · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because you get innovations. Example: I was pleased to see Firefox does "active bookmarks" using RSS, which change bookmarks depending on the content of the site (for example, I see a "RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable" link now). Eventually, most RSS programs are going to get folded into the browser anyway, so it's good to take the important pieces.

  2. Re:Personal web portal by DavidLeblond · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yahoo does this, check it out.

    my.yahoo.com

  3. Re:Personal web portal by prockcore · · Score: 3, Informative

    Imagine the possibility to design/allocate different news on diferent section of a web page, with different links, and everybody will get an instant GoogleNews with fully customised content.

    You don't need to imagine it anymore. My.Yahoo does exactly this. Allowing you to put RSS feeds on your custom page.

    We're looking at doing this exact same thing on our own site.

  4. Re:Personal web portal by GrAfFiT · · Score: 5, Informative

    FeedReader (windows) does this.
    Anyway, you can easily find this kind of PHP script.

  5. On Demand by fembots · · Score: 5, Informative

    RSS is FOD (feed on demand), so yo don't get what you didn't ask for, and you can easily filter/remove undesired RSS feed.

    1. Re:On Demand by lostguy · · Score: 2, Informative

      Out of curiosity, have you looked at something like Coral?

    2. Re:On Demand by BigJimSlade · · Score: 2, Informative

      My only problem with this, is that I run a small site on a 512KBps(down)/1024KBps(up) connection, and I get the equilivant of a slashdot effect every 30 minutes because of all the RSS feed readers.

      1) Are you sure you're setting the correct HTTP response codes to let users know that content has/has not been updated? This can solve the problem for about 85% of your users, I would imagine.

      2) Consider using a 3rd-party feed provider, such as FeedBurner. It will even give you most of the statistics you would get if you hosted the feed yourself.

  6. Re:Personal web portal by PierceLabs · · Score: 3, Informative

    SlashDock does this (and I was actually surprised to find it not listed). When I do a "view digest" of these I get a web page of the feeds that I was interested in served locally. Its actually pretty cool, though I don't use it much.

  7. Re:Apple gets it wrong by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 2, Informative

    evolution has rss tied in, its nice. opera also has rss tied in (i think its nicer in opera, because its just a panel, click it to open a new window in the program your already running).

    i get the latest /. headlines using rss in opera - try it.

  8. Re:I'm still waiting for... by cosmo7 · · Score: 4, Informative

    RSS on the menubar. It's just my preference, I can't justify it with any arguments, but I find it odd that with so many RSS readers out there for OSX I can't find one that puts news in a hierarchical menu.

    Try NewsYouCanUse.

    (Sorry for spamming my product, but it does exactly what you're looking for.)

  9. Re:what is the point of RSS? by curious.corn · · Score: 3, Informative

    RSS feeds are xml. You can XSTL one and insert it into another feed or generic xml, html, native widget interface. You can, of course, code your own site specific parser to recognize the newsletter's incipit text patterns but it makes some work doesn't it? So essentially it's nothing new (like say, transportation or calculus) but it's much easier to deal with (like walking compared to flight or pencil & paper to that nifty CPU humming on your desk).

    --
    Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
  10. Re:Enough? by outZider · · Score: 3, Informative
    --
    - oZ
    // i am here.
  11. Podcasts by sjonke · · Score: 2, Informative

    The only thing RSS I'm actually using and somewhat "get" is iPodder for podcasts. Minimalist and klunky, though. I wish it would notify me when a new podcast has been downloaded. As it is I have to check iTunes manually to see if there's anything new. Better still it should check to see if your iPod is connected, and if it is, tell iTunes to sync it. Then it really would be loading your iPod for you.

    --
    --- What?
  12. Re:Enough? by jrp2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Eventually, most RSS programs are going to get folded into the browser anyway, so it's good to take the important pieces.

    First, you might want to checkout the sage extension for Firefox as opposed to the builtin live bookmarks. It is very nice.

    My guess is you are mostly right, the mass consumption of RSS will be a PC browser embedded function. My guess is the hardcore will use other apps, such as feedreader, feeddemon, etc. They are far more refined for the purpose.

    I think it will be very intesting how all this shakes out, and what clever ideas people come up with to use RSS (I have seen very innovative ideas already). The beatuy of RSS, is it's flexibility and generic nature, leaving the display to the whims of the users.

    Also remember, the applications will go well beyond traditional PCs. I worked on a fairly infamous product (spectacular failure, mostly an idea before it's time that cost too much) called Audrey from 3Com. It was a small Internet Appliance (aimed for the kitchen, family room, etc.) that could browse and check email, but it's really cool feature was programmable "channels" for content, selected by a rotary knob on the front. You would program in what you wanted each channel to be (say Chicago Weather, football news, etc.) for each channel. You can "change the channel" like a TV.

    What was behind all this? RSS (or a close cousin, at least, it was early in the game). Had we had all the RSS content there is now, that would have made the feature that much more compelling (we had a hell of a time getting content at the time).

    Other, non-PC apps could be customized news on a mobile phone, driving electronic marquees (think Times Square). Yeah, these things are done now, but mostly manually, with limited selection of content. RSS opens up this kind of application to the little guy (think Main Street in East Bumfsck, Iowa), and opens up custom content on mobile phones (rather than the small selection of canned feeds available now).

    Anyway, don't restrict the application to traditional PCs, and don't restrict the application to just traditional web content. RSS has potential to do what the web has done on a larger scale, provide access to non-web outlets (phones, etc.) only the big guys could access before.

    --
    The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
  13. It's the format by ShatteredDream · · Score: 2, Informative

    Theoretically, it is easy to write a RSS reader. For example you can create a RSS reader for your blog in PHP that will pull the latest headlines from your friends' blogs so that y'all can link back and forth to each other. I say theoretically because you have RSS 0.92, RSS/RDF 1.0 and RSS 2.0. That's why Atom came into being, a bunch of guys finally wanted a standard XML grammar that wouldn't change with the latest whims of its maintainers and users.

    There really is nothing stopping you from writing plugins for MovableType or another blog package that supports plugins, that would allow you to send email or post to usenet. The question is... why would you want to do that as an alternative to RSS rather than maybe a compliment? Your automatically generated messages would probably just got shot down by a spam filter.

  14. Re:what is the point of RSS? by System.out.println() · · Score: 2, Informative

    RSS means that the same content available on websites is available in a feed. Since it bears repeating, that's the same content, at the same time.

    The other thing it's having going for it is its popularity among web developers. Most web developers could care less about a usenet group and don't want to go to the trouble of a mailing list. Something like HTML on a smaller scale - whether it's good or not doesn't matter, what's important is that it's everywhere, and it's (usually) consistent. More sites with RSS mean more people will be interested in RSS readers, and it builds on itself.

  15. Yeah, no kidding! by eLoco · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...with the authors of the five major RSS clients for OS X: NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsMac, PulpFiction and Shrook...

    Not that I'm an RSS fanatic, but I've heard of exactly one of these (NetNewsWire), and everyone I know on OS X uses SlashDock, so this strikes me as uninformed. And not mentioning SlashDock on Slashdot, of all things...

    --
    sig != null
  16. use web browser by pointyhairedmba · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why not just use a web interface so that you don't have a Mac or PC version. I've been playing with Pluck's ( http://www.pluck.com ) web interface which I like. Other vendors also have web interfaces.