[bbales]

I have seen info on newsreader products (Unison just won an award, according to MacNN) -- and such things look intriguing. ANyone out there use a newsreader? How does it help you -- does it make it easier to check a bunch of frequently checked sites all at once, for example? This one has a demo, so I'm going to try it out later, but this is something I've wondered about for a while. So -- I turn to those with experience!

[Diggory Laycock]

There are two different kinds of app there -

Unison (and Entourage, etc..) are NewsReaders - they use the NNTP protocol to read newsGroups off the net. I'm not sure how many people use newsgroups any more.

NetNewsWire and Shrook et. al. are RSS feed readers - they allow you to get notified when a site changes.

[JKT]

If you mean RSS in the next version of Safari, here's how OW 5 handles it now:



When you visit a site with an RSS feed, OW5 indicates this with an icon that lets you add that feed to your bookmarks. This feed is self-updating so as in the image above, using BBC News as an example, as one new story is added to the feed the oldest one drops off the bottom (that is, there is a constant number of stories per feed, so addition of x at the top means removal of the same number at the bottom). In OW5, the Dock icon indicates how many updated bookmarks their are (the white number surrounded by green in the image above), including those in feeds. You can then see in a glance what new e.g. news stories have been added at BBC News, or stories at The Register or MacNN or MacCentral, etc.

Now OW5 is just doing something fairly basic with RSS feeds - the dedicated news readers offer more, but it gives you a gist of what they are and why they are useful.

Essentially, what RSS feeds enable you to do is see what new articles have been added to all your favourite websites at once without having to load those sites in your browser.

Edit: Once you view an article it is removed from the list of updated sites, so you only see which articles you have not yet read.

[-Q-]

Newsgroups have been pushed aside by web forums and filesharing apps. There are still benefits to using them if you are looking for particular files or looking to find people with expertise in a certain field.

Most major ISPs give you a newsgroup account, so why not download Unison and check them out?

[zepkin]

Originally posted by JKT:
[B]If you mean RSS in the next version of Safari, here's how OW 5 handles it now:

I like OmniWeb 5, I really do. But the RSS implementation is absolutely atrocious, so bad that RSS in my opinion is not worth using in OmniWeb. No, I do not believe that RSS should necessarily be separate from the browser. I do think, though, that the feeds should be displayed in the browser rather than in the damned bookmark section of the app. I really hope Omni updates this aspect of OmniWeb. If the implementation were better, I would be using OmniWeb full time.

I am excited about RSS in Safari--looks like Apple has gotten it right.