I have to say NetNewsWire Lite is being something of a let down.

When it was first released I, over in my Linux ghetto, was wracked with envy as privileged OS X users collectively chirped and burbled over its amazingness, and usage, as attested to by hundreds of access logs across the web went through the roof. Mark once asked, “Does it come with crack, or what?” (may have been quoting Phil, but I can’t find that quote) Now I’m among the chosen and can run my very own copy of NetNewsWire, I find it leaves something to be desired.

Features I miss from Straw

  1. Keep old items. I read technobabble and literary nonsense daily, but save up my political research, and current events monitoring for days when I feel up to it, often blowing through a week of BBC and Guardian articles over a pot of strong coffee.
  2. Show locations for live links. NNW makes RSS items with HTML in them “live”, downloading pictures, and making links clickable. This is great. However from within NNW you have no way of knowing where those links go, which for me defeats the purpose entirely.
  3. Metadata. I want to see the author, and timestamp information at least. (Quick check reveals this is a feature of the full version. Ack. Seems so fundamental as to make the Lite version seem crippled)

NNW Gets Right

  1. Attractive.
  2. Fast.
  3. Simple.

Features I Still Want

  1. Hierarchical display of feeds. Sort feeds into expandable and collapsible folders. (Thank you. Missed that. Works perfectly. This is why I have a blog.)
  2. Configurable meta-data display. Ideally I would like to be able to tell my aggregator how to display topic information, or mod_event information.
  3. Easy re-publish. (I think this is in the full version of NNW)

Ben pointed at Shrook, which looks promising, but follow up comments make it sound like it doesn’t add much to NNW. People keep telling me to try Newsmonster, but the “big, flaky, uninstallable” reputation is scary enough that I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at it. (which is probably unfair as I’m sure it is much much better these days. Kevin is too smart for it not to be)

The real point is, I don’t want to switch! I spent all these months lusting over NetNewsWire, and now to be disappointed is so, well, disappointing! In other news, Linux is not as far behind in the desktop software game as we’ve all been led to believe.