A return to desktop apps?
Today NewsGator released NetNewsWire and their various RSS readers for free. This is huge and great news — I’ve used NetNewsWireLite on and off, really liked the user interface, but for whatever reason never took the plunge to purchase. I had switched over to Google Reader because you can obviously get your feeds anywhere by doing so. However, being a web-based app it wasn’t perfect — in particular it is incredibly painful to move subscriptions around in different folders (unless I’m missing something) and you can’t customize the style (without crazy hacks).
The best part about NetNewsWire (besides the interface) is there is a syncing service that maintains your subscriptions across multiple computers and a web-based interface, basically the best of all worlds. And it’s now free! How did I get so lucky?
Also on my personal computer I’m getting my Gmail through Mail.app. I’ll admit, they really didn’t get along at first, but things are running smoothly now. It’s not perfect, either, but I like the new interface, and it’s nice having a desktop mail client with a preview window.
Anyway, I just find it interesting that in our era of web apps I’ve reverted two important things to the desktop. Of course, they have beautiful Mac interfaces and the data is stored online, but still.
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