RSS Newsreaders

The tricky part about choosing one newsreader is how similar they tend to be, despite the relative youth of the technology involved. Most look like an e-mail program, listing RSS sites on the left (sometimes grouped in folders called channels), each site's headlines at the top right and the current headline and story at the bottom right. The differences among them usually come down to what options they support and how fast they run.

ADC Software's NewzCrawler (Win 95 or newer, $25 at www.newzcrawler.com) is perhaps the most flexible newsreader around. Beyond RSS, this fast, easily customizable program also collects and presents newsfeeds delivered with a newer protocol called Atom and postings from Usenet newsgroups. You can even view Web sites that don't offer newsfeeds at all.

Aggie is a news aggregator: it is a desktop application that downloads the latest news and displays it in a webpage.

AmphetaDesk. AmphetaDesk is a free, cross platform, open-sourced, syndicated news aggregator - it obediently sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage. With thousands of channels available, AmphetaDesk can shave hours off your day - and you'll look smart to all your friends! Egotism never had it better!

Awasu(TM) is a free Windows news-reader that runs in the background on your computer and monitors these sites for you. When it sees that something new has appeared, it will let you know. Awasu will also keep track of what you have already read which saves you even more time since you no longer need to search through your favorite sites for new stories.

Another "payware" newsreader, Bradbury Software's FeedDemon (Win 98 or newer, $30 at www.feeddemon.com), runs even faster and includes an "auto-discover" feature that can find a site's feed based only on its Web address. But instead of displaying each RSS item in its entirety, it only shows a summary; click on that, and the Web page in question should load in FeedDemon's window -- except that some pages aren't presented correctly, requiring lengthy back-and-forth scrolling.

RSSReader (Win 98 or newer, free at www.rssreader.com) leaves out FeedDemon's price tag, but also its performance. It was easily the slowest newsreader we tried -- partially because it runs on Microsoft's .Net Framework, an inefficient bundle of code that lets developers add Web functions to their software.

SharpReader (Win 98 or newer, free at www.sharpreader.net) also relies on the .Net Framework, although it wasn't as slow as RSSReader. It feels unfinished in some ways: Instead of an installation routine, you have to unzip a downloaded file, then move that folder into your Program Files directory. On the other hand, it supports Atom as well as RSS and offers the most attractive, simplest interface of any Windows newsreader.

Wildgrape's NewsDesk (Win 98 or newer, free at www.wildgrape.net), a third newsreader that uses the .Net Framework and suffers the attendant performance penalties, may offer the easiest introduction to RSS, with a simple installer and more than 50 news channels already set up.

Mac users, meanwhile, have a much simpler choice: Ranchero Software's NetNewsWire Lite (Mac OS X 10.1 or newer, free at www.ranchero.com; scroll down the page for the $40 pay version of NetNewsWire for the link). Besides offering a pleasant, elegant interface, it includes a helpful "subscribe" function, akin to Feed Demon's auto-discover feature, that can sign up for a site's feed automatically.

Source: The Washington Post