Ars Technica reviews Apple Macintosh RSS newsreaders

“Newsreaders deliver all the content and none of the fluff. No popups, no unnecessary graphics; the text is styled just how you want it. It is perfect,” Brian Warren writes for Ars Technica. “Maybe ‘perfect’ is a bit of an exaggeration. The can be one casualty of this highly filtered, highly targeted approach. When you get all you need and none of the fluff, there’s less of a chance to just surf around and find new and interesting things. If you’re solely reliant on newsreaders for your daily content needs, novelty is hard to come by unless it shows up in your newsfeed. That’s fine I suppose, but back in the day, we used to find cool things on our own. But I digress…”

Warren writes, “Once RSS became popular, Mac developers leaped at the chance to develop newsreaders for the Mac. We had to limit our review to just six dedicated newsreader apps, plus two browsers that can also handle RSS feeds. So if you don’t see anything you like in the next few pages, there are other options from which to choose. Most of the RSS readers we tested have built-in web browsers and offer basic RSS reading functionality. For the eight apps chosen for this review, we put them through the wringer and pitted them against the toughest XML, the dirtiest Atom, and the harshest RSS.”

On the hot seat…
• PulpFiction
• NewsMacPro
• NewsFire
• Shrook
• NewsFan
• NetNewsWire
• Safari RSS
• OmniWeb

Warren’s comprehensive review of the above Mac RSS readers here.