NewsFire 1.4 (v69) review

Click to read our editor's review for NewsFireNewsFire is a RSS news aggregator that takes a sharp departure from existing interface paradigms.

License: Shareware OS: Mac OS X File size: 0K Developer: David Watanabe Buy Now Price: $18.00 Updated: 21 Sep 2006

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Click to read our editor's review for NewsFireNewsFire is a RSS news aggregator that takes a sharp departure from existing interface paradigms. Its interface is very similar to a dubbed down iChat interface, where the latest feeds move up to the top of the list in the same animated fashion as iChat users becoming available.

There's a variety of RSS readers on Mac OS X, but none offer the style of NewsFire.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a booming technology for sharing information on the web. Popular news sites like Yahoo!, BBC News, The New York Times, CNET and Wired, along with tens of thousands of personal blogs and independant media sites all publish RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

Naturally, the volume of information being published every second is hard to grasp and keep abreast of. If you had to visit each site and click 'Refresh', you'd never get anything done. Enter NewsFire, which is like a turbocharged bookmark menu for your news sites. NewsFire constantly checks for freshly published news from your list of news feeds and notifies you. There's even some eye-candy involved - NewsFire's list of news feeds is animated just like iChat, so feeds swoop around as news is discovered.

NewsFire is brimming with Aqua-beauty and a rich, dynamic user experience. The others feel aesthetically unpleasant, bloated, and stuck in an interface paradigm that makes no sense for RSS. The kitchen sink is deliberately not included in NewsFire - it is intensely focused on simplicity. It snubs complexity for a minimalist interface that is intuitive, unobtrusive, and a total joy to use.

NewsFire supports the two major feed formats - RSS and Atom. It also imports and exports OPML, a standard bookmark-like file format for news feeds. Importing your feeds from another newsreader is dead-simple!

Limitations:
Nag-Screens.

What's New:
minor tweaks.