News Aggregators for Mac OS X

By "news aggregators" here I mean programs that let you peruse "syndicated" headlines (RSS, Atom, etc. formats) provided by some websites, including this one. This should not be confused with newsreading software, which usually refers to programs for reading usenet news.

By now (May 2004) the old standard is NetNewsWire (or NetNewsWire Lite). It works and is smooth, pleasant to use, and stable. However, there are some alternatives under development that are available in early versions. The two I've tried still need work, but they offer some significant features missing from NetNewsWire (but see these notes about NNW).

PulpFiction

This looked great on the website, but was a disaster when I tried to use it. The windows scroll very slowly (on my 450 MHz G4). I can almost live with that, but the application crashed whenever I did a "get info" on a subscription. The features that attracted me to the program are its support of Atom feeds (missing from NetNewsWire) and its ability to group articles into virtual folders based on filters.

I think this last feature has become essential, now that there are so many feeds available. Let's say you want to keep track of articles that mention Apple Computer and lawsuits. Unless your aggregator has some kind of automatic filtering mechanism you will need to page through scores of headlines, even if you limit your manual search to the most likely websites. PulpFiction can gather the articles from your subscribed sites that talk about both these subjects and put them into a special folder for you. Or I guess it could, if it didn't crash. I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

Shrook 2

This is what I'm using now. It has filters, implemented similarly to PulpFiction. It also has two advanced and unusual features that I'll try to describe briefly, but you should visit their website for more information (or just try it out!).

The first of these features is automatic synchronization: you can register at the Shrook website and the current state of your news reading will be automatically saved there in the background. When you go to a different computer you can continue reading news, and Shrook will know to what you have subscribed, what you have already seen, etc. You can even read your news on the website, although as of yet the state of your reading there will not be saved into the Shrook desktop. This is quite convenient; in order to keep multiple machines synchronized using, say, NetNewsWire, you would have to remember to copy a database between them (or store the database on a networked volume).

The second advanced feature is distributed checking of news, and I don't know exacly how this works. Apparently, when I'm running Shrook it doesn't have to check each subscribed website periodically to keep its list of articles fresh, but uses information from the Shrook website gathered by all the copies of Shrook that people are running. This way Shrook seems to be able to present me with a list of recently posted headlines for each subscription without having to frequently poll each subscribed website. They claim:

The average time between an item being posted and appearing in Shrook is just five minutes, all without placing undue burden on publishers.”

This, or something like it, could be a solution to a growing problem that has caused some popular websites to have to shut down their feeds due to the enormous bandwidth burden placed on them by thousands of personal aggregators each polling them at frequent intervals.

The visual interface of Shrook conveys the information I need at a glance: for each group or virtual folder I can see how many articles have been added since I've looked at the headlines, and how many I've seen but not read. Scrolling and display is fast and smooth. There are some interface glitches, for instance the scrollbar in the preview panel gets lost at times, but nothing serious, and it's not crashed yet. You might not like the long, multiple paned single window.

The only real problem that I've found is that Shrook sometimes seems to use a big chunk to CPU time in the background and affects the responsiveness of other programs; during these periods the Shrook window says "Saving changes".

Both these programs share certain other less notable features, such as an integrated web browser and the ability to mark articles manually.

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