Apps I Use: Vienna
RSS feeds have become a large part of the internet. They allow for management of information flow in a digestible manner. Since many sites I frequent have a feed I have ended up subscribing to many different feeds, as a result I need a newsreader app to manage them. For a long time I used NetNewswire happily, but they were purchased by NewsGator. Some of the changes they made afterwards made the program no longer good for me. I then tried Safari’s newsreader which is somewhat limited. I eventually found a good program called Vienna.
Vienna is freeware newsreader for OS X that is as good or better than the shareware programs out there. Once installed it will after the first launch become your default newsreader. This means you can click on the RSS icon on a webpage or in the address bar and it will load into Vienna, subscribing to that feed. It supports RSS and Atom feeds.
Vienna has many positive attributes. The interface is very simple and unobtrusive, with panes that show a list of subscribed feeds, downloaded articles and a preview of the article. I use the standard “left,top/bottom view” but it supports a 3 column view, and a “unified” view as well. Vienna also offers some integration with a blogging application.
A default view
The interface, while nice, is not the main reason I use Vienna. It’s what I call the “management” features that I like. The ability to flag articles that I want to save is very useful, especially regarding material for this blag. Deleted articles are first moved to a trash for recovery, this trash can be cleared on exit. Articles and feeds can also be organized further. It supports groupings of feeds and allows for filtering of articles. Vienna offers some advanced filtering capabilities.>
The filtering capabilities of Vienna are very advanced. It allows for “Smart Folders” which filter on a number of fields. There are three default smart folders for unread, the current days and marked articles. You can create your own though with filtering based date, author, grouping and most other fields.
Built-in Browser
Vienna has a built-in browser that is based on webkit. It also will handle various filetypes embedded in the R$RSS feed. This is all handled through the OS I think. It works very well, with no hiccups for as long as I’ve used it. It will also import/export files in the common OPML format so you can backup your subscriptions and organization layout. It does not offer .mac sync support though. This is something I wish it did have since I have multiple computers.
Overall Vienna is a well-designed application that does what the commercial applications do as well or better. I recommend it for your news reading needs. To find out more about Vienna visit their website at http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php