Over the past week, I’ve been trying out a whole bunch of Mac software. From NewsFire, Yojimbo, TextMate and the application I’m composing this post on, MarsEdit.

All of these applications are free to try out being either feature limited or fully functional for about 30 days. As I’ve mentioned before in my Vienna post, I love trying out new applications and have found a lot to be happy about in the world of indie Mac software development. Sparked by the buzz of MacHeist, I set out to try some of the most popular indie Mac software out there.

First up, NewsFire. If you read my post about Vienna, you know that I’m into RSS feeds. Vienna is an amazing application especially when you consider the fact that it’s free. It even has a web browser built into it that I’ve heard good things about. One thing I found a bit annoying with Vienna was the fact that I had to do a lot of scrolling up and down since the 12-inch screen on my iBook wasn’t large enough for the 33 feeds I had.

Enter NewsFire.

Developed by Dave Watanabe, NewsFire is one of the most beautiful applications I’ve ever used. That’s saying a lot, considering a lot of apps on the Mac are visually amazing. Not only does it ooze with style, it has a feature that clearly solves the issue I had with Vienna. With NewsFire, whenever a new RSS item is detected, the feed moves to the top of the list. This drastically cuts down on the amount of scrolling I have to do. At first I didn’t like how my feeds were flying all over the place in the sidebar (you really gotta check it out!) but over time, I’ve gotten used to it and find it very convenient.

NewsFire has all the basic features of an RSS reader including adding, removing and grouping feeds, along with importing from and exporting to OPML format. On top of all that, it also supports podcasts (think of them as audio RSS feeds) and exporting to Apple’s iTunes application. Don’t want to export podcasts to iTunes? No problem, NewsFire has a built-in audio player to playback those audio files from within NewsFire. Neat.

There are some subtle features of NewsFire that I enjoy as well. For instance, NewsFire can take a plain website address and discover if it has an RSS or Atom feed associated with it. Prior to using that feature, adding RSS feeds to Vienna was a three step process:

  1. Go to the site in Safari
  2. Click the little RSS button in Safari’s address bar
  3. Copy the RSS/Atom URL and add it to Vienna

There are loads of other features in NewsFire including support for blogging applications such as MarsEdit and programs that post bookmarks to a del.cio.us account.

With a gorgeous user-interface and excellent features, NewsFire is definitely an application that any Mac owner should try out. I loved NewsFire so much, I bought it!