I have fired up an RSS reader again, for the first time in months. I had to give it up last time because I was trying to read between 100 and 200 feeds every day (I don't remember how many, and I can't recreate the list if I wanted to—but more about that later), two of which were Boing Boing and Engadget. If you've ever read either, you know they're each good for twenty or so posts a day.
Well, there was a second reason. I probably could have mustered the self-control to prune my feed list. After all, I did pull the plug. More on that second reason later.
This time around, I'm keeping it small. I'm currently subscribed to 20 feeds, but three of them I own or contribute to (however poorly or infrequently), and a couple others came by default with the newsreader I'm using, looked interesting for the time being, but may be dropped later. My motivation this time was keeping up with my blog buddy. (Ooh. That reminds me of another friend's blog. Up my count to 21.)
It turns out that one's newsreader can have a profound impact on one's enthusiasm for news feeds. Come to think of it, that probably goes for just about every computing activity, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'm that sad, sad combination of code gnome and Macintosh user. I'm regularly awash in aesthetics, and I know from experience how hard it is to write a good, usable application—so I have zero tolerance for third-rate cack that looks like it was cobbled together by some bozo with Visual Basic and freshly-cracked copy of Visual Basic for Dummies
The first two newsreaders I tried way back when were NetNewsWire and PulpFiction. NetNewsWire seems to be a favorite in the Macintosh community, but it never did it for me. It may have been the interface (I seem to remember it looked so 1999, and I freely admin that I'm an Aqua tramp); or it may have been because it came stocked with a zillion feeds, only three of which held any interest.
PulpFiction, on the other hand, was like that person you lusted after all through high school—pretty to look at, but when you got to know it better, the experience was so excruciating that you wondered what the hell you'd been thinking. In the case of PulpFiction, it was chock-full of Cocoa eye candy, but it was slow. I'd say it was as slow as molasses, but that would be unfair to the sorghum industry. It made me regret every second I spent trying to do anything with it. Come to think of it, there were a few people in high school who probably said the same thing about me.
NewsFire—now that was like... no, I'm not naming names. Let's just say I'm too young for Christie Brinkley and too old for Christy Carlson Romano. Now imagine she lives next door. And she thinks you're cool. NewsFire was like that. I'd call it love at first sight, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal in Kansas.
NewsFire is almost everything a Mac OS X application should be. It's slick, but not gaudy. The interface is simple, but highly functional: a column of feed names, with the count of how many posts you haven't read, on the left, and a pane on the right. Click on a feed name, and the right pane shows a list of all the posts for that feed. Click on a feed, and the right pane is filled with the text of the post. There are handy buttons for moving to the next post (or previous post). As you read posts, or as new ones come in, the feed names swoosh around in their column like screen names in iChat. (Why did I feel the need to explain that? If you're a Mac OS X user, you already know what I'm talking about. If you're not, you wrote me off as a Mac weenie and stopped reading a long time ago. I have learned that a great way to get out of annoying conversations is to say "This one time, on my Macintosh...".) I can't do it justice in words. Go look for yourself.
Okay, so you're thinking, if NewsFire is all that, why do you keep referring to it in the past tense? It turns out that NewsFire decided I was that person it didn't want to be around.
I jumped on the NewsFire bandwagon when it was still in beta—I forget how early, but it was a pretty small number. Every once in a while—fairly often, in fact; David Watanabe was doing a great job of fixing bugs and adding features—it would pop a box saying that a new version was available and I should download it. Fine, I said, download away. And install away. Who doesn't like new versions?
Then, one day, immediately after installing a new version, NewsFire popped a new box—the old "pay up and I'll go away" nag dialog. Fine, David always said it wouldn't be free forever, and I'm in favor of paying for software if it's sweet, sweet software. Which NewsFire was. Except that it wouldn't allow me to add more feeds, at least not until I deleted all but 10 of the ones I already had. (I told you I had a compulsion.) And it kept popping the nag dialog. Every. Thirty. Minutes.
That alone probably wouldn't have made me stop using NewsFire—that took an intervention of one—but it made it easier. I recall that David caught several windstorms-worth of crap via email over this, which he attempted to rationalize in his blog:
It has been noted that NewsFire has “unexpectedly” made the transition from “freeware” to shareware. I put “freeware” in quotes because it never was freeware, and I never said it was freeware - it was in a public beta release. Its eventual transition to shareware was always planned and this plan has always been public knowledge. I put “unexpected” in quotes because this was publicly known since NewsFire version 0.1 in August 2004.
I can't speak for everyone else who complained; I for one knew it was not freeware. My quibble is that he should have put "eventual" in quotes. Or perhaps "transition". Or perhaps "publicly known". "Unexpectedly" certainly does not belong in quotes. I don't recall any kind of warning like, "hey folks, come version 1.0 you're going to need to start paying". Instead, it was "here's a new version", then bang, you're locked out of your feed list and you're being nagged. Every. Thirty. Minutes.
Still, like some daytime talk show reject, I came back for more this go-round. Maybe it's different, I thought.
Wrong. It still looks good enough to eat, but now it has deleted all but maybe 10 of my feeds (with, I assume, no hope of recovery, which is not necessarily a bad thing, since I had so many, but that should be my choice to make, shouldn't it?) and it still nags. Every. Thirty. Minutes. I even set the refresh interval to once per day—I really shouldn't be refreshing more than that; I have a compulsion, remember?—but it still nags. Every. Thirty. Minutes.
So, NewsFire gets left by the curb, without cab fare even. And in waltzes....
PulpFiction.
It looks as good as I remember, but boy howdy, has the performance improved. It even comes in a less-featureful free version that is, well, less featureful, but at least it doesn't get in your face all the time and beg to be appreciated. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that NewsFire does, and I have no doubt that every once in a while we're going to quarrel. But you know what? I think it's going to be okay. It's just good enough that I'll probably use it every day.
And here's the lesson for David Watanabe, which I hope he'll see when he Googles himself and NewsFire and clicks through nineteen pages of other results to find this, because my PageRank is undoubtedly crap:
It's just good enough that I'll probably pay for the full version.
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