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."

Comments

Enough?

[someonewhois]

It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?

Re:Enough?

[MmmDee]

It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?

Careful, some folks could have said the same thing about operating systems. Even before the Microsoft/Linux arrivals.

Re:Enough?

[System.out.println()]

Eventually, most RSS programs are going to get folded into the browser anyway

What makes you say that? That's like saying email will be folded into the browser - sure, there's webmail, or Mozilla Suite, but they're different applications with different purposes. Unless they do something ridiculously clever, I don't see how a browser can offer any more than basic RSS support without becoming bloated.

Not meant as a troll but...

[OS24Ever]

...To me this just highlights the differences of the developer communities. The comment of 'amazing how they got together' vs. yelling at each other is the culture of the respective sales methods of the hardware and/or operating systems they are built on.

PC Hardware (teir one) vendors spend weeks with FUD about the other products. (IE Tommy Boy and "But what if the Guarantee Fairy's a crazy glue sniffer? Next thing you know there's change missing from your dresser and your daughter's knocked up. I've seen it a hundred times.")

Windows does the same thing from a development standpoint (DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run) and to some extent the semi-zealotry of the OSS community (to parapharase Mike Myers 'If it's not GPL it's CRAP!' and all the associated 'KDE is l33t gnome is proprietary' type things.

Just my $0.02

Still banging out bugs

[Matey-O]

I'm finding that each RSS reader I see brings a feature or two I'd like, but none of them do everything right.

-Thunderbird does really well, but the keyboadr shortcuts don't drop down to the view window...want to see the next page? Hit space, see the next RSS feed item. (D'oh!)
-Another makes you click the item, then click the preview, when all you really want on some sites is to go from the item to the fill-monty (like Slashdot, for example)
-One updates Every Fifteen Minutes...ensuring you'll never get work done. Finish a pile of Rss feeds, Alt-tab over to your application, and it insistently bounces on the app bar telling you you've got more to read!

It's like all of the RSS programmers didn't have any UI background and have to learn all the useability stuff we figgured out in Web Browsers....and Word Processors, and OS's...

Yea but what happens when..

[L0u13]

All well and good that the Mac developers can make a standard, but what happens when Microsoft comes out with MSRSS or RSSnet that is completely proprietary?

Re:Yea but what happens when..

[dick johnson]

Not much, me thinks. Microsoft can offer such a standard, but it's up to Web Developers to deploy it. Why would such a standard be better than RSS? The point of having a web presence is to reach as many readers/users as possible. Limiting my company's site only to users of Microsoft products doesn't stand up to that test. The site I work for uses RSS and I can't see any circumstance where we would provide content only to some (ie, Windows) readers.

Re:what is the point of RSS?

[Erik Hollensbe]

To put it bluntly, RSS means that I don't have to subscribe to your crappy flash interface to read your worthwhile content.