NewsLife: Easy To Use RSS News For Everybody
Apple December 15th, 2006Are you still in the search of an excellent news-reader but haven’t found it yet? NewsLife may be the answer to your problems.
NewsLife is a new RSS reader made by ThinkMac Software. NewsLife lets you organise all the websites and blogs you get your daily news fix from just like a list of bookmarks. If you know how RSS works, then I wont bore you with the details, but in short, NewsLife allows you to “bookmark” sites and it will notify you of any new content that is posted.
It’s interface is very similar to popular RSS reader NewsFire, apart from a few cosmetic differences. One thing I like about it is the sidebar to the right of the main window, it allows you to search articles, sort them by different criterias, and even drag stories and add them to a “NewsBin” for later reference.
NewsLife has been designed from the ground up to focus on being genuinly easy to use - it doesn’t try and replace iTunes or your web browser, it’s designed to fit seamlessly into your Internet experience, and to make it better. I would recommend it to anyone new to RSS, or someone who likes to work in a very simple application environment.
It also includes some great little features such as “Speck Article”, which will read the article out loud to you. And other features such as Digg this, and add to Del.icio.us, all valuable timesavers.
Personally I’m sticking with NewsFire, what about you?
NewsLife is currently in beta, and can be downloaded here.
December 15th, 2006 at 7:53 am
I’m sticking with Newsfire but the digg and del.icio.us features look nice. If there was one thing wrong with Newsfire it’s the lack good searching features and NewsLife looks like its got a head start in that area.
December 15th, 2006 at 8:37 am
NewsLife certaily looks nice and I think the UI is better laid out than in NewsFire. But, even though it’s a beta, it has some amazing bugs, that make me stick with NetNewsWire for now.
December 15th, 2006 at 9:11 am
I personally use Netvibes[.com] to read my feeds…I find it to be much easier than an offline feed since I can open anything I’m interested in inside of a tab in the same window. I just don’t see the allure of a desktop application.
December 15th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Newslife has a nice UI but it’s quite buggy from what I’ve seen so far. I can’t even get the search to work. Does it work for anyone?
December 15th, 2006 at 11:11 am
I tried it too. I am sticking with Google Reader. It is flexible, accessible anywhere and its sharing features are fantastic.
December 15th, 2006 at 11:48 am
HAHA Glenn! This looks so cool. When you said “Everybody” in the title, I thought it was for windows too! Oh well. :-(
December 15th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Sticking with NewsFire, too.
December 15th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Trying it now… rather buggy. Has that same annoying inability to shift select items in the sidebar that NewsFire has. The search doesn’t do anything here either. One thing I will give it is launch time and general speed. Even with all my feeds it launches in 1 bounce NewFire takes 8-10.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
It would have to cook my dinner and do my homework for me to drop NewsFire.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
I am really happy and satisfied with Safari RSS and NewsFire. I’ve got this great combination going where I’ve prioritised feeds and split them between Safari RSS and NewsFire. For example, AppleInsider is in NewsFire, whereas my Flickr comment feed is in Safari RSS.
I’m glad you too are sticking to NewsFire, Glenn. It’s a much cooler and better designed app somehow. Come on, there’s no one like Watanabe when it comes to Mac software.
One question, what’s the lowest feed refresh time in NewsLife?
December 15th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Smaran, it’s 20 minutes.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Definitely too slow for me. I’m getting edgy about NewsFire’s 5min limit, no way I can use a reader that’s even slower.
December 16th, 2006 at 4:18 am
I’m sticking with Vienna.
It’s free, open source and fast.
December 16th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Glenn,
All things aside (NewsLife looks like it has some potential, if they’d fix that damn top-bar with the dragger–it’s all wrong.)–but, just a tip, if you’re going to show your readers screenshots of apps you’re promoting/talking about/reviewing, it’d probably be best to show them without your custom UI modifications (Uno, most likely) running–as it really does change the perception of the app.
(For example, I was going to say “why are the preferences so ugly,” but then realized they’re really the standard Aqua prefs with Uno running on top of your machine…)
Cheers.
December 16th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Brian, a lot of Glenn’s users are UNO users as well. Die-hard ones at that.
In fact, I’ve been anti-UNO for a while but have recently started using it on Aqua apps.
December 18th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Sticking with NewsFire. Although I do like the Digg feature. Maybe I will try it out.