Cool New App: Vienna

A few months ago I realized that trying to manage all my RSS feeds with Safari was becoming quite the pain. I was cramming my bookmarks bar full of folders, sending some bookmarks that wouldn't fit anymore out of view into the land of might-as-well-not-be-bookmarked-for-all-the-good-it-does-you-now. And the numbers of unread posts were bringing out obsessive compulsive qualities in me—I just had to get rid of those numbers no matter what I was in the middle of. Of course that's sort of how all RSS readers are, so I guess I'll just live with that. I concluded that I should at least try a devoted RSS reader, even though it felt markedly nerdy.

I decided I wasn't going to spend any money on this since Safari can handle the feeds, albeit not so elegantly, so shareware solutions were out of the question. I landed on NetNewsWire Lite and test drove it for quite awhile on my iMac. It worked fairly well but I always had the strong feeling that the pay-for version is a lot better. It just felt like there were missing features. Grouping feeds into folders is one fairly basic feature that I wished it had. And call me silly but I just couldn't stand the icon. For most people that probably doesn't matter, but for me it has an impact on how much I enjoy using a program. "Chicken of the VNC":http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/ is another example in that category, though even worse off for its stupid name.

The other day I was scanning the new apps posted on "MacUpdate":http://www.macupdate.com and I noticed an RSS reader called "Vienna":http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php. The "(Free)" at the end inspired me to give it a shot, and I'm most happy I did. The first thing I noticed was its great icon. If it had a crappy icon I don't think I would have even opened it. Importing feeds was easy though I had to refresh them all to see anything at all. Minor hiccup but it also makes sense. The interface looks generally like your standard RSS reader: left column for feeds, right column split so that articles are listed on top and article display on the bottom. As I started using it though I discovered some very cool features. First, not only group folders but smart folders. Second, it uses WebKit and opens up any clicked links inside Vienna itself. Beautiful!! Even better, it uses tabs to do so. And web browsing doesn't seem to lose much functionality from Safari. You can view media, go back and forward in the browsing history, type in another URL, and even download files (which Vienna manages with its own Downloads window).

Another very useful feature I've been utilizing is a 'Mark all articles read' button at the bottom of the window. What's great about it is that it not only marks all the articles as read, it then advances to the next feed with unread articles. Just plain intuitive.

I should note that Vienna is actually at version 2.1, so when I say "new" app I simply mean new to me (NBC taught me that valuable lesson years ago). It certainly feels like a lot of work and polish has gone into it.

Bottom line: my RSS loyalties now lie with Vienna, at least until "Canary Reader":http://canaryreader.com/ launches hatches. And now I must wrap up because I've been distracted for the last few paragraphs by Vienna's icon telling me there are unread articles. And I think I have a "Monk":http://www.usanetwork.com/series/monk/ episode to watch...