When Safari came with RSS built-in, I gave Shrook a break. I have several hundred feeds I track, and even though I like many of the clever features in Shrook, I just couldn’t stand the veeeery slow launch time, and quite a few freezes.
Having the RSS feeds in Safari was nice. I could see the unread articles right there in my bookmarks bar, and I didn’t have to launch another program just to add a feed.
Safari RSS needs some improvement, especially in the combination with the Adressbook, which I have written about before.
The biggest problem with the Safari RSS function is that is not stable. Several times a week, it seems to forget which articles I have read and not read. Which of course makes a total mess with several hundred feeds. Unforgivable.
The next problem: No way to set up refresh differently on different feeds. I would like to check Boingboing more often than Daring Fireball. Not because one is better than the other, but because I know that Cory & co. posts lots of articles a day, while John only posts now and then.
I also would very much like some kind of smart folder function, as both Shrook and NetNewsWire has.
What I really don’t understand is why Spotlight isn’t able to search through all articles stored in Safari RSS? Very strange. If Spotlight did, it would have been easy to make smart folders in Finder.
So for now, I’m over to NetNewsWire. I bought a licence for NetNewsWire 2 and MarsEdit. So far, everything has been running very smoothly. The podcasting features are excellent, and it’s fast and stable. And I love the fact that I can customize and change settings for almost anything.
One little problem was how to get the feeds I have in Safari over to NetNewsWire, but Google fixed that in 2.3 seconds: Sameer D’Costa had a solution which worked fine. All feeds came over as “Untitled source”, but a quick refresh put their names and favicons back in place.
Now I have some work ahead to set up a better list (put favorites in folders etc.) and make the smart folders for my subjects of interest.