Comments on: Vienna

By: The Apple Blog » Om Malik: NewsGator to buy NetNewsWire?

The Apple Blog » Om Malik: NewsGator to buy NetNewsWire? — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 14:12:03 +0000

[...] Dan had done a fairly extensive review of News Readers a while back. And Vienna too! Leave a response | Email This Article | Print This Article | [...]

By: Rahul Sinha

Rahul Sinha — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 17:11:59 +0000

I have to say, one of NetNewsWire’s top features for me is the .Mac sync. I just received my new Powermac, and upon downloading the application and setting it to sync, instantly all the feeds and groups from my Powerbook were set up. Following this the two instances of NNW arrange to ensure an article marked read in one is read in the other etc.

Many people sneer at .Mac. As webspace, it is a so-so deal, especially now, with the bandwidth caps. As a tool for “clustering” together one’s various Macs it is invaluable. Be it the automatic propagation of keychains, Omniweb bookmarks, email settings etc, it provides a service that no other platform offers.

I truly hope, for its own sake, that Vienna explores the possibilities that .Mac can provide in this area. I hear the new SDK expands on the possibilities and capabilities of the .Mac service.

-RS

By: Karst

Karst — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 09:31:51 +0000

As much as I like Netnewswire, I just don’t use it anymore since Safari 2.0 was released. I find the RSS feature built into the browser very, very handy. It sure is very basic, doesn’t have a lot of features, but I really like how smooth it works.
I’ll give Vienna a try though, who knows it’s even better than Safari RSS ;-)

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:42:03 +0000

Jason,

You should do a roundup of the best (in your opinion) OSS for OSX. You have some really good points about how it lets down, but occasionally shines.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:40:30 +0000

The source for Vienna is up on SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vienna-rss

Follow the CVS link on that page.

By: Jason Terhorst

Jason Terhorst — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:37:48 +0000

Ugh. I know I have issues when my typed comments are longer than the original article.

By: Jason Terhorst

Jason Terhorst — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:36:41 +0000

That is true, that people will often gain comfort with a commercial product, and will just glance at an open source project. For instance, I – like many people – use Word… a lot. I briefly played with Open Office. It was bundled in Knoppix and Mandrake, so I’ve played with it more than enough. It was very much like Office 97 for Windows (and felt slow and clunky like it). After that mere glance, I confirmed that I would be using Word for a while. Sure, Pages is cool, but doesn’t compete with Word as much as Publisher.

Overall, open source offerings tend to disappoint folks, which is kind of sad, since they are examples of the power of collaboration. Unfortunately, the people involved are usually software engineers, who aren’t very skilled with design, though they can do an excellent job with the programming part of it. The interfaces are clunky, slow, ugly, and just Microsoft-ish. But that’s why when I use Adium, I don’t think “this is open-source”, though I know I can download the source for it and play with it. The only curse that Adium gets from the OSS world is taking forever to get out of beta – they’re still in 0.8! Whatever Adium does, the rest of the OSS people need to find out the secret, and learn from them. Otherwise, Microsoft will be able to roll over on top of them before long.

Speaking of source, where are the downloadable source packages at, Steve? I’d like to take a look.

By: Dalle

Dalle — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 17:50:57 +0000

i guess im just to happy with Safari i installed Firefox and other browsers but i just keep on using Safari. I will test Vienna but dont think i will “use” it.

Most of my friends are the same Safari is good enough.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 16:52:28 +0000

Jason,
Thanks for pointing my error out to me. I meant to say that this seems to be the first open source news reader to compete with the big dogs. I too, love adium, and have been using it for ages.

Also, I agree that David Wattanabe is a total loon.

By: PXLated

PXLated — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 05:47:42 +0000

Really nice to see the developer (Steve) open and engaged in the conversation. I really liked NewsFire but the developer is less than helpful or accommodating. Good luck Steve.