Feed 0.6.5 review

There are a lot of RSS readers for Mac OS X out there, and Apple even added RSS capabilities directly to Safari in Tiger (10.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 1124K Developer: Keith Anderson Price: $0.00 Updated: 18 Jul 2005

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There are a lot of RSS readers for Mac OS X out there, and Apple even added RSS capabilities directly to Safari in Tiger (10.4) - so why did I write this? Because all of the existing (Free) RSS readers are approaching the problem from the wrong side.

I treat my RSS feeds more like email than anything else, and the current crop of RSS reader is more a hybrid between iTunes and a web browser. I wrote Feed to address this issue.

Here are some key features of "Feed":
Simple and Familiar
Feed is designed to work like a mail program and includes a simple single window interface. Individual articles are displayed directly in Feed using WebKit (the Safari web engine) which means less clicking and more reading.
Drag & Drop Support
Feed allows you to drag Text and URL Clippings directly into the Feed Drawer from any application. Found a link in Safari you want to add? Did a friend pass you a source in an iChat? Simply drag them into Feed and you're done! You can also drag any Feed or Article to another application that accepts Text or URL clippings to easily share them with your friends.
BitTorrent Enclosures - New!
If you subscribe to a source that includes links to BitTorrent files, Feed will display those links directly in the preview pane as a clickable and draggable link. You can simply click to open with your default browser or drag the URL directly to a BitTorrent client that supports Drag & Drop of Torrent files (like Hurricane).
Audio Notifications
Choose any of your installed sounds to play when you have new items available - or none!
Bookmarks
You can bookmark articles in the feed list with a simple command or by dragging it to the Feed Drawer. This allows you to group articles for later reading or to save an article indefinitely.
Feed Organization
You can completely customize the way feeds are managed and displayed with an intuitive Drag and Drop interface. Feed allows you to group your feeds into folders and then display all articles in the group together.
Supported Standards
Feed currently supports all versions of Atom and RSS. You can import and export your existing RSS feed subscriptions in the industry standard OPML format (as used by NetNewsWire, Shrook and others).

What's New:
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) compatibility.
Significantly improved parser leniency for badly formed XML sources. Only greviously malformed XML will fail now.
Rewrote source loading and threading backend to be much more stable and much faster.
Stop counting Updated articles as New. This results in far fewer 'false positives'.
Fixed broken selection and sorting behavior.
Many usability fixes implemented to make Feed more approachable to newbies.
Updates can now be cancelled.
Date displays now honor international settings.
Fixed broken Open Links External function.
Implemented article preview caching for speed and as preparation for Spotlight support.
Fixed bug that would throw invalid 404 Not Found errors for valid sources.
Added a default source to a new installation - the Feed announcement RSS.
Added Mark All Read command to mark all articles in the selected sources as read.
Properly handle Open URL Apple Events to enable feed:// style URLs to work with Feed. You can now set Feed as your default RSS reader in Safari and it'll work correctly!
Support BitTorrent enclosures in RSS sources.
No longer tries to make connections where no network is available.
Fixed OMPL import bug for files that actually included hierarchical data.