NewsFire Beta
I'm on a quest to become more productive.
As a part of that journey, I've decided to revisit the realm of RSS feed viewers. I used NetNewsWire Lite for a few months last year; but found it to be too cumbersome. When Safari was released, I completely stopped using NetNewsWire, and condensed all of my daily reads into a tabbed group. On average, I open that group three times per day.
Unfortunately, many of my favorite sites don't update as often as I check them. Sure, I'm only wasting 5 seconds per tab; but when you have a few dozen sites, several times a day, it adds up. I found out about NewsFire from browsing the OSX tag at del.icio.us. It looked to be extremely light, performing the bare necessities that I was looking for in my daily browse.
After demo-ing the product for a few days, I have to say "so far, so good." As a web designer, I miss visiting the actual pages; but this frees me up to get other business done. Even if that means finding new sites to add to my daily reads.
It's very easy to add a feed to your list. It is a two-field entry process, and one of the two is optional. You can specify how often to check for feeds, and the alert type (if any) you prefer. The interface is clean and similar to other brushed metal OS X applications like iTunes, but FAR more simple. In fact, NewsFire may be the easiest all around application that I've ever used.
The product is still in beta; but in my testing it was very stable. My only concern is that the product remain true to its current form factor and ease of use. If additional features are added as the point version increases, it would be nice to have a "streamlined" preference to only see and use the basics.
It's currently a free application, so give it a shot and see how much time NewsFire can save you.