The Processor

I don’t know about you, but I’m someone who likes to know about stuff as soon as it’s announced. When it comes to news and technology-related announcements, I like knowing about it but don’t have the capacity to keep refreshing a news page or a tech rumour/announcements website. This is where RSS or Atom feeds come in.

RSS and Atom Feeds (they’re different but accomplish the same thing), in simple terms are things that announce the availability of something to someone provided that latter is subscribed to a feed. For instance, if you subscribe to the RSS feed on my blog, as soon as I add a new post, it’s “delivered” to you without you having to visit my site. This can also be done for comments on individual posts. Pretty cool eh?

Anyway, I’ve really gotten into RSS feeds after getting my iBook G4 since Safari (the default browser on a Mac) handles RSS feeds in a very convenient way. If you’ve ever used Mozilla Firefox’s RSS/Atom feeds, you know what I’m talking about. However, RSS/Atom feeds in Safari look cool mainly because they appear in the browser’s main window along with a multitude of filters and a search field on the right side of the browser. It’s a very cool setup.

However, while going through my Digg/Technology RSS feed, I came across a Top 10 Freeware Apps for Mac posting (there have been a whole bunch of Top-10-ish posting on Digg lately), and via it, to a program called Vienna. I’d heard of this program before but from what I gathered, another program called NetNewsWire overshadowed it.

I love open-source software mainly due to its price (free) but also because it’s often feature-rich and very polished in terms of presentation. Since Vienna is open-source and free, I downloaded it. There is a free version of NetNewsWire, but it doesn’t have nearly as many features as NetNewsWire and so its aptly named NetNewsWire Lite. The only reason I didn’t download it was due to the its size, a whopping 6.4Mb. Vienna weighed in at around 2.6Mb, which is very comfortable. I don’t know, maybe I’ll try out NetNewsWire Lite, I’m pretty sure it’ll serve my very basic RSS/Atom needs.

Vienna is an amazing application. It is an RSS/Atom feed viewer and management application, and that’s all it tries to do. Sure, it got a built-in tabbed browser but it also has the option of letting your browser of choice handle any item you want to see in full, as opposed to the feed view. Now, the point of this post is not to review Vienna, but rather, it’s to let you know that I’m an RSS junkie. I kinda realized it before using Vienna but it really struck me since I loaded my subscribed feeds into Vienna.

Did you notice the screenshot above? That’s the Vienna icon and the number (149) is the number of unread RSS/Atom items waiting for me since this morning. Of course, most of those I’ve already read since I have almost the same subscriptions set up in Mozilla Firefox 2 at work. I started to realize that I’m an RSS/Atom lover after I noticed that most of what I saw on Digg/Technology, I had already seen via the multitude of feeds I go through prior to checking my Digg/Technology feed. It’s crazy.

I’m thinking of adding a few more feeds tonight, the theme of which might be news in general. I’ve currently categorized my subscriptions with names such as Technology, Mac, and Favourite Blogs. Guess another category couldn’t hurt…right?