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Software OS X Operating Systems

RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable 114

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-different dept.
Thoro writes "There is an unusual interview with the authors of the five major RSS clients for OS X: NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsMac, PulpFiction and Shrook. Safari RSS, Apple, the hype around RSS and the role of the news aggregator in the future are discussed. It's also hinted that the performance problems of RSS may be overblown. It is a breath of fresh air to see so many competitors come together to talk civily and not to better gang up on another."
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RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable More

RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable

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  • Rephrase? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Orgazmus ( 761208 )
    "so many competitors come together to talk civily and not to better gang up on another"

    need i say more?

  • Enough? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by someonewhois ( 808065 ) * on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:21PM (#10559041) Homepage
    It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?

    • Re:Enough? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:27PM (#10559095) Homepage
      Because you get innovations. Example: I was pleased to see Firefox does "active bookmarks" using RSS, which change bookmarks depending on the content of the site (for example, I see a "RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable" link now). Eventually, most RSS programs are going to get folded into the browser anyway, so it's good to take the important pieces.
      • Eventually, most RSS programs are going to get folded into the browser anyway

        What makes you say that? That's like saying email will be folded into the browser - sure, there's webmail, or Mozilla Suite, but they're different applications with different purposes. Unless they do something ridiculously clever, I don't see how a browser can offer any more than basic RSS support without becoming bloated.
      • I wish someone would be innovative enough to make a Mac RSS reader that works like KNewsTicker! I don't understand why people insist on having a vertical list/email-like/webpage-like interface when a ticker-tape is so perfect.

        The only problem with KNewsTicker is that I'd have to install the entirety of KDE to use it : (

      • Re:Enough? (Score:5, Informative)

        by jrp2 ( 458093 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:36PM (#10559592) Homepage
        Eventually, most RSS programs are going to get folded into the browser anyway, so it's good to take the important pieces.

        First, you might want to checkout the sage extension for Firefox [mozdev.org] as opposed to the builtin live bookmarks. It is very nice.

        My guess is you are mostly right, the mass consumption of RSS will be a PC browser embedded function. My guess is the hardcore will use other apps, such as feedreader, feeddemon, etc. They are far more refined for the purpose.

        I think it will be very intesting how all this shakes out, and what clever ideas people come up with to use RSS (I have seen very innovative ideas already). The beatuy of RSS, is it's flexibility and generic nature, leaving the display to the whims of the users.

        Also remember, the applications will go well beyond traditional PCs. I worked on a fairly infamous product (spectacular failure, mostly an idea before it's time that cost too much) called Audrey from 3Com. It was a small Internet Appliance (aimed for the kitchen, family room, etc.) that could browse and check email, but it's really cool feature was programmable "channels" for content, selected by a rotary knob on the front. You would program in what you wanted each channel to be (say Chicago Weather, football news, etc.) for each channel. You can "change the channel" like a TV.

        What was behind all this? RSS (or a close cousin, at least, it was early in the game). Had we had all the RSS content there is now, that would have made the feature that much more compelling (we had a hell of a time getting content at the time).

        Other, non-PC apps could be customized news on a mobile phone, driving electronic marquees (think Times Square). Yeah, these things are done now, but mostly manually, with limited selection of content. RSS opens up this kind of application to the little guy (think Main Street in East Bumfsck, Iowa), and opens up custom content on mobile phones (rather than the small selection of canned feeds available now).

        Anyway, don't restrict the application to traditional PCs, and don't restrict the application to just traditional web content. RSS has potential to do what the web has done on a larger scale, provide access to non-web outlets (phones, etc.) only the big guys could access before.

    • Re:Enough? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MmmDee ( 800731 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:33PM (#10559145)
      It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?

      Careful, some folks could have said the same thing about operating systems. Even before the Microsoft/Linux arrivals.

    • Re:Enough? (Score:5, Funny)

      by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:36PM (#10559161) Homepage
      Ahem...

      someonewhois (808065): "It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?"

      The same might be said for /. user accounts. ;)
    • RSS on the menubar. It's just my preference, I can't justify it with any arguments, but I find it odd that with so many RSS readers out there for OSX I can't find one that puts news in a hierarchical menu.

      I'd also like to see a decent ticker with a reasonable interface. Something not too intrusive that will roll selected headlines across the menubar or somewhere else once in a while, not constantly. I looked at a screensaver that did RSS but it did way too much work and crashed a bunch. I just want to o

      • Re:I'm still waiting for... (Score:5, Informative)

        by cosmo7 ( 325616 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:25PM (#10559503) Homepage
        RSS on the menubar. It's just my preference, I can't justify it with any arguments, but I find it odd that with so many RSS readers out there for OSX I can't find one that puts news in a hierarchical menu.

        Try NewsYouCanUse [autostylus.com].

        (Sorry for spamming my product, but it does exactly what you're looking for.)
      • Or you can try You Control [yousoftware.com]. It gives you a highly customizable Menubar RSS reader plus a large number of other customizable menus. The application is a bit expensive, but you might want to check it out for the amazing variety of customizable menu's it lets you create.

    • Perhaps to ensure that there is "lots of software available" and "a strong developer base" for the platform for which one wishes to evangelize...?

      And no, I didn't get through reading the article, because the "Macs rule, PCs drool" beginning of the interview turned me off entirely. The very premise of the first question was my first clue that annoyances lay ahead. I've never felt that I was facing a dearth of RSS reading/aggregating capabilities on my PC. (FWIW, my current RSS reader is my browser, i.e.,

      • Re:Enough? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by drunkenbatman ( 464281 )
        It's too bad you felt that way. It isn't about a dearth, it's about relative market share. Windows currently has something akin to 40 RSS readers of various qualities, while OSX has something like 6-8 of decent quality, past that and you're going to be stretching your idea of what you can call an aggregator.

        That said, Apple is a pretty miniscule marketshare at the moment. While you can fudge things by talking about installed base, going by that installed base still decimates OS X's marketshare numbers. In

    • Re:Enough? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by saddino ( 183491 )
      People keep making more because the "optimal" UI metaphor for RSS is still being determined. The authors in the article have products that run the gamut from three panel email-like (NetNewsWire, Pulp) to iChat-like (NewsFire), to Finder-like (Shrook). And recently, authors such as myself (ahem, plug follows) have been working on ticker-like RSS/Atom readers such as Tickershock [mesadynamics.com] and Stickler [metafy.com] (a competitor -- equal time rules in effect).

      And with Apple getting in the mix with their browser-style Safari RSS,

    • Re:Enough? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 47Ronin ( 39566 )
      It seems like they're tons out there, why do people keep making more?

      Because developers for Mac are doing the same thing as Windows developers.. building dozens of titles that do the same exact thing, hence crushing the argument that "there isn't any software for Mac"

      The difference is, in the Windows world there are hundreds of titles for each purpose, 90% of which may be crap. In the Mac universe, you may have only one or two titles for each purpose, but they're usually of very good quality.

  • Personal web portal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:27PM (#10559100) Homepage
    Is there a reader that is flexible enough to allow users to make a pseudo web site (ie serving locally) with those aggregating syndicated content?

    Imagine the possibility to design/allocate different news on diferent section of a web page, with different links, and everybody will get an instant GoogleNews with fully customised content.

  • Not meant as a troll but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OS24Ever ( 245667 ) * <trekkie@nomorestars.com> on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:41PM (#10559200) Homepage Journal
    ...To me this just highlights the differences of the developer communities. The comment of 'amazing how they got together' vs. yelling at each other is the culture of the respective sales methods of the hardware and/or operating systems they are built on.

    PC Hardware (teir one) vendors spend weeks with FUD about the other products. (IE Tommy Boy and "But what if the Guarantee Fairy's a crazy glue sniffer? Next thing you know there's change missing from your dresser and your daughter's knocked up. I've seen it a hundred times.")

    Windows does the same thing from a development standpoint (DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run) and to some extent the semi-zealotry of the OSS community (to parapharase Mike Myers 'If it's not GPL it's CRAP!' and all the associated 'KDE is l33t gnome is proprietary' type things.

    Just my $0.02

  • Apple gets it wrong (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apple is going to introduce Safari RSS with Mac OS X 10.4.

    I think Apple should tied RSS reader with Mail.app, not the browser. What you think about that?
    • evolution has rss tied in, its nice. opera also has rss tied in (i think its nicer in opera, because its just a panel, click it to open a new window in the program your already running).

      i get the latest /. headlines using rss in opera - try it.

    • I think it would be silly to tie and RSS reader to a Mail tool.

      After all, RSS feeds are from websites and link to articles that are posted on web sites.

    • I completely agree - so I wrote my own: Feed [keeto.net]. It's still got some rough edges, but works well enough for everyday use, is Open Source and supports RSS and Atom.

  • what is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <[delirium-slashdot] [at] [hackish.org]> on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:45PM (#10559221)
    Am I the only one who doesn't get the point of RSS? It seems to be providing periodic updates in a concise format. Can't you do that by setting things up to send items by email every time there's a new item posted? Or even by UseNet to a moderated group? What does RSS do that's new?

    • On Demand (Score:5, Informative)

      by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:47PM (#10559237) Homepage
      RSS is FOD (feed on demand), so yo don't get what you didn't ask for, and you can easily filter/remove undesired RSS feed.

    • Re:what is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by slimyrubber ( 791109 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:56PM (#10559307)
      Can't you do that by setting things up to send items by email every time there's a new item posted? Or even by UseNet to a moderated group? What does RSS do that's new?
      First off, you dont need to delete all the email once the 'expire'. Secondly firefox's live bookmarks are way too cool to be compaired with running an email client and switching between that and the browser. Thirdly, what you suggested is just another way of doing it and what difference would that make?

      So what is the point of getting updates via email when you can just use live bookmarks from within browser, for example. Plus RSS are really valuable because they can and are integrated within various news feed sites like google news. Thats the strongest point of RSS feeds.

      • Re:what is the point of RSS? (Score:4, Informative)

        by curious.corn ( 167387 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:26PM (#10559512)
        RSS feeds are xml. You can XSTL one and insert it into another feed or generic xml, html, native widget interface. You can, of course, code your own site specific parser to recognize the newsletter's incipit text patterns but it makes some work doesn't it? So essentially it's nothing new (like say, transportation or calculus) but it's much easier to deal with (like walking compared to flight or pencil & paper to that nifty CPU humming on your desk).
    • It's a great, dynamic format that can be used in some really useful ways: I love my Firefox live bookmarks, it lets me check the /. stories without even leaving whatever site I'm on.
      • I already check my email regularly, because I'm on a bunch of announcement lists and mailing lists. If I wanted to read each new Slashdot story as it came in without visiting the site, I could just have them emailed to me, and they'd be filtered into a "Slashdot" box. What does RSS give me that this setup doesn't, besides another damn client?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:29PM (#10559541)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Many sites, including Slashdot, will email you the new stories when they come out. How does subscribing to the RSS feed work out better than subscribing to the email feed? Besides being another client?

        I imagine soon we'll have standardized ways to get comments and post replies in an RSS client, then the client will add killfiles and whatnot, and then we'll have reinvented the discussion group yet again.

    • It's the format (Score:3, Informative)

      by ShatteredDream ( 636520 )
      Theoretically, it is easy to write a RSS reader. For example you can create a RSS reader for your blog in PHP that will pull the latest headlines from your friends' blogs so that y'all can link back and forth to each other. I say theoretically because you have RSS 0.92, RSS/RDF 1.0 and RSS 2.0. That's why Atom came into being, a bunch of guys finally wanted a standard XML grammar that wouldn't change with the latest whims of its maintainers and users.

      There really is nothing stopping you from writing plugin
    • RSS means that the same content available on websites is available in a feed. Since it bears repeating, that's the same content, at the same time.

      The other thing it's having going for it is its popularity among web developers. Most web developers could care less about a usenet group and don't want to go to the trouble of a mailing list. Something like HTML on a smaller scale - whether it's good or not doesn't matter, what's important is that it's everywhere, and it's (usually) consistent. More sites with R
    • RSS is more standard than email, so I can parse the data in a common format. This allows me, for instance, to put multiple RSS feeds on my home page. This allows me to get headline updates for multiple web sites in one shot, rather than have to deal with email (which needs to be manually deleted).
      • RSS is more standard than email, so I can parse the data in a common format.

        Which common format would that be?
        At last count there were 9 incompatable versions [diveintomark.org] of RSS. And then there's Atom, which itself has a few incompatable versions floating out there in the wild.

        And that's not counting the lack of content standards. Should they be full-text or excerpts? Should they include the author, the subject, the category? Should they contain full-size images? Should they contain enclosures? Should they con
        • Oh come on, there may be 10 versions of RSS, but at least it's a fixed number. There is no standard whatsoever for sending such data via email, because email is free-form text. I would need to write a separate parser for each email source I get. At least with RSS, I know that if I support all 10 versions, I will support everything.

    • Re:what is the point of RSS? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A dial-up connection (low bandwidth) might open your eyes to some advantages of RSS. It makes web news as fast as Usenet, yet more formal (less like a help desk). Mail lists create their own bandwidth and storage problems, in a world full of spam (Mail lists are often also harvest points for spammers wanting real addresses).

      For instance, You can every new SlashDot feed, without rereading the old ones, in a rather concise format, in one page so to speak, expand only those headlines of interest. You could do

  • Still banging out bugs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Monday October 18, 2004 @03:56PM (#10559305) Homepage Journal
    I'm finding that each RSS reader I see brings a feature or two I'd like, but none of them do everything right.

    -Thunderbird does really well, but the keyboadr shortcuts don't drop down to the view window...want to see the next page? Hit space, see the next RSS feed item. (D'oh!)
    -Another makes you click the item, then click the preview, when all you really want on some sites is to go from the item to the fill-monty (like Slashdot, for example)
    -One updates Every Fifteen Minutes...ensuring you'll never get work done. Finish a pile of Rss feeds, Alt-tab over to your application, and it insistently bounces on the app bar telling you you've got more to read!

    It's like all of the RSS programmers didn't have any UI background and have to learn all the useability stuff we figgured out in Web Browsers....and Word Processors, and OS's...
  • I wanted to comment on the claims that RSS performance problems may be "overblown", but all I get is 503 errors!
    Must be all those darn RSS users trying to get their slashdot feed on the hour.

  • Yea but what happens when.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by L0u13 ( 818231 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:04PM (#10559366) Homepage
    All well and good that the Mac developers can make a standard, but what happens when Microsoft comes out with MSRSS or RSSnet that is completely proprietary?
    • Not much, me thinks. Microsoft can offer such a standard, but it's up to Web Developers to deploy it. Why would such a standard be better than RSS? The point of having a web presence is to reach as many readers/users as possible. Limiting my company's site only to users of Microsoft products doesn't stand up to that test. The site I work for uses RSS and I can't see any circumstance where we would provide content only to some (ie, Windows) readers.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What? No SlashDock? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ZZ-Type ( 577907 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:14PM (#10559430) Homepage

    Where's SlashDock in the list? http://homepage.mac.com/stas/slashdock.html [mac.com]

    This is what I use to constantly check SlashDot for new stories. It's probably the best I've seen, is contantly updated and is FREE! (Donations accepted.)

    I have no connection other than liking and using SlashDock.

    • Yeah, no kidding! (Score:2, Informative)

      by eLoco ( 459203 )

      ...with the authors of the five major RSS clients for OS X: NetNewsWire, NewsFire, NewsMac, PulpFiction and Shrook...

      Not that I'm an RSS fanatic, but I've heard of exactly one of these (NetNewsWire), and everyone I know on OS X uses SlashDock, so this strikes me as uninformed. And not mentioning SlashDock on Slashdot, of all things...

    • The interview was with a group of commercial RSS aggregators for Mac OS X. It was not meant to be a review of every RSS aggregator out there, but an "interview" with a group of programmers of full-featured (?) or commercial (true, one was is free) RSS aggregators.

  • Podcasts (Score:3, Informative)

    by sjonke ( 457707 ) * on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:31PM (#10559555) Journal
    The only thing RSS I'm actually using and somewhat "get" is iPodder for podcasts. Minimalist and klunky, though. I wish it would notify me when a new podcast has been downloaded. As it is I have to check iTunes manually to see if there's anything new. Better still it should check to see if your iPod is connected, and if it is, tell iTunes to sync it. Then it really would be loading your iPod for you.
  • Why not just use a web interface so that you don't have a Mac or PC version. I've been playing with Pluck's ( http://www.pluck.com ) web interface which I like. Other vendors also have web interfaces.

  • traffic overflow (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PureCreditor ( 300490 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @09:30PM (#10561387)
    The idea of RSS is great, but how is different from the late 90's idea of pushing content to the desktop, such as Microsoft's Active Desktop?

    2 issues posed :
    1) Automated RSS agents might update too often, thus creating unnecessary network traffic.
    2) The user might need to access the absolutely latest headlines, and the RSS agent might be displaying a cached copy. Then when the user access the original site's frontpage, the original intent of RSS is defeated.

    I'm a huge fan of RSS (esp My Yahoo portal's implementation), but the problems need to be addressed.

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