I have quite a collection of RSS Feeds (industry related as well as personal) that I read every day and Google Reader wasn’t just cutting it. So I tried out several RSS Readers that sync with Google Reader and one stood out from the rest: NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire displays all of your feeds in the left column so you can click on any feed to display the individual posts. Clicking on the Latest News Smart List will display posts for all of your feeds in one window.

What I like is the ability to categorize my folders. For instance, I have a “Mac” folder in which I store all of my Mac feeds. Then, I need only to click on the folder to display all of the feeds in one window.  Likewise, I have my other feeds organized into separate folders as well:  Tech, iPad, Language, Home/Garden, etc.  Oh – and sorting is extremely flexible.  You can sort subscriptions by name, unread count, attention, and last updated, and you can sort the feed columns by date, source, subject, creator or title.

Navigation is easy – click the down-arrow key on your keyboard to move from one article to another. If you want to read the rest of an article, either click the Headline or press the right arrow key and a new tab will display the full article. All open tabs are displayed in the right pane so you can quickly navigate to them. If you instead prefer to read the article in your default browser, right-click the headline and choose “Open in Default Browser”. If you prefer, you can set NetNewsWire to always load full articles in your browser from the program Preferences.

By keeping the program open, you can always have an up-to-date list of feeds. The number of new posts is displayed on the icon in the Dock. And if you use more than one computer, it’s nice to know that all your feeds are synced to Google Reader. This way, you have access to all of your updated and synced feeds when on a different machine.

NetNewsWire has support for one of my favorite services – Instapaper.  Use Ctrl + P to send an item to Instapaper or select News > Send to Instapaper from the menu.  You can also send items to Delicious, to Twitter, to your own blog or e-mail a link to a specific article.

In my opinion, NetNewsWire is a flexible, feature-rich and extremely customizable RSS reader that is definitely worth a glance. It certainly makes my life a lot easier.

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