Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is there a reader that is flexible enough to allow users to make a pseudo web site (ie serving locally) with those aggregating syndicated content?
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Apple is going to introduce Safari RSS with Mac OS X 10.4.
I think Apple should tied RSS reader with Mail.app, not the browser. What you think about that?
Am I the only one who doesn't get the point of RSS? It seems to be providing periodic updates in a concise format. Can't you do that by setting things up to send items by email every time there's a new item posted? Or even by UseNet to a moderated group? What does RSS do that's new?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd also like to see a decent ticker with a reasonable interface. Something not too intrusive that will roll selected headlines across the menubar or somewhere else once in a while, not constantly. I looked at a screensaver that did RSS but it did way too much work and crashed a bunch. I just want to occasionally know when there is a new headline on certain RSS feeds.
Of course, there are tons of other potential RSS applications out there; reading slashdot headlines using different interfaces is only the tip of the iceberg. Being able to integrate RSS and similarly updated information into other applications could be very useful.
Where's SlashDock in the list? http://homepage.mac.com/stas/slashdock.html
This is what I use to constantly check SlashDot for new stories. It's probably the best I've seen, is contantly updated and is FREE! (Donations accepted.)
I have no connection other than liking and using SlashDock.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those who forget the past are doomed
It's too bad you felt that way. It isn't about a dearth, it's about relative market share. Windows currently has something akin to 40 RSS readers of various qualities, while OSX has something like 6-8 of decent quality, past that and you're going to be stretching your idea of what you can call an aggregator.
That said, Apple is a pretty miniscule marketshare at the moment. While you can fudge things by talking about installed base, going by that installed base still decimates OS X's marketshare numbers. In most areas of software selection on the Mac, this is reflected pretty starkly. But not for RSS readers, and that's what I was after.
I'll admit they were a little ra-ra, but that was how they wanted to take it. I simply posed the question, I think it's a worthwhile one.
People keep making more because the "optimal" UI metaphor for RSS is still being determined. The authors in the article have products that run the gamut from three panel email-like (NetNewsWire, Pulp) to iChat-like (NewsFire), to Finder-like (Shrook). And recently, authors such as myself (ahem, plug follows) have been working on ticker-like RSS/Atom readers such as Tickershock and Stickler (a competitor -- equal time rules in effect).
And with Apple getting in the mix with their browser-style Safari RSS, we'll just have to see what pans out of the mix.
> 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.
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.
I'm starting to consider offering a mailing feature instead because of this.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?
Because developers for Mac are doing the same thing as Windows developers.. building dozens of titles that do the same exact thing, hence crushing the argument that "there isn't any software for Mac"
The difference is, in the Windows world there are hundreds of titles for each purpose, 90% of which may be crap. In the Mac universe, you may have only one or two titles for each purpose, but they're usually of very good quality.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
If you use a Mac, please check out NewsFire. Really, I haven't found a program so useful and unobtrusive in such a long time. Nowadays, I just hit my RSS reader when I have time to read things. I don't even bother going to sites anymore.
It solves all 3 of these problems very elegantly.
Of course, I wrote an article about how it annoys me that people who provide feeds don't include the full articles. It's really rather silly. They could include ads too, and I would embrace it.
The idea of RSS is great, but how is different from the late 90's idea of pushing content to the desktop, such as Microsoft's Active Desktop?
:
2 issues posed
1) Automated RSS agents might update too often, thus creating unnecessary network traffic.
2) The user might need to access the absolutely latest headlines, and the RSS agent might be displaying a cached copy. Then when the user access the original site's frontpage, the original intent of RSS is defeated.
I'm a huge fan of RSS (esp My Yahoo portal's implementation), but the problems need to be addressed.
Why not just use a web interface
A lot of people want their feed reader to interact with their desktop environment and other desktop apps.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Ok, I'll put it this way:
I get a lot of mail generated by CVS commits. A *lot* of mail.
Now, I can either read that mail or I can ignore it. Regardless of the effect, it appears in my mailbox, and I have to write several filters to keep it from obscuring my mother's wonderful chain letters telling me how much she loves me.
90% of the time, I don't care what's in that diff, where it's applied, or anything.
But I spent a good deal of time writing a small script to generate those emails. Sounds like something pretty counter-productive, especially when I can use the CVS tools or something like cvsweb to look at those diffs, right? Not really. As I'm sure you know, having the ability to use my mail client's search tool to scan through those makes it easy.
Enter cvs2rss. Instead of generating emails that get pushed to my mailbox every commit, it generates a RSS file on the server, which points to the cvsweb stuff. What does this mean?
Instead of getting 40 emails a day and ignoring 39 of them, I configure my reader to scan the rss file once a day. It doesn't interfere with my mail checking, nothing else, as a matter of fact. And when I *do* want to check out something, I can go to cvsweb, where I can do a lot more than just stare at the diff - which is nice if I want to annotate. And our mail administrator is happy because I don't have an IMAP box crammed with every patch since the inception of the project.
If you want to take this further, imagine slashdot's email load, which pushes emails when stories come out. Now, I may not care about the latest story, nor do I want to read slashdot as often as they send out emails. So I configure my RSS reader to check slashdot every 4 hours. Result? The only time I visit slashdot now is to (like right now), reply to comments that have been made to mine. And it's like this for every site that uses RSS. BBC, Slashdot. CSMonitor, they all have the same interface, my RSS reader NewsFire, which is much better suited to giving me a pile of links and descriptions than my email client is.