Vienna RSS

Evil Genius

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p class=”lettrine lang=”en”>Like many other geeks, the shutdown of Google Reader forced me to look for alternatives. I tried , while the UI looks nice at first glance, it is really not convenient: a lot of pixel space is wasted to draw colourful blocks and the interface is far from responsive, the way Feedly runs on OS X is also way toO intrusive: a safari extension, which does not work when one uses the nightly builds. I really fail to see the point of such a development scheme: you have to support each browser as a separate platform, and you are still bounds by the performance of javascript and the UI possibilities of a browser.
I reverted for a few days to Reader, when I saw ads for another alternative tool: Taptu so I tried it out. Compared to Taptu, Feedly is a well design and smooth UI, after five minutes, I could not figure out how to import all my reader feeds into the tool. Again a lot of colour blocks (darker than Feedly) with no clear navigation feature, nor any special tool to import from Reader, which is really stupid when you start a advertisement campaign aiming reader users. I suspect they’ll get a horrible conversion rate.

Alias is using Newsblur without being overly enthusiastic which is a shame for a paying service. Another friend of mine suggested I try out . Vienna is an old-school Mac OS X application, with a UI that looks like that of the mail program of OS X: left pane with the list of feeds on the left, top with each item, below the preview, articles are opened into a new tab. The interface feels a bit retro, but makes way better use of my screen space that its HTML brethren with its compact menu. Basically I use its compact mode to sort out what I’m really going to read, then open it up in Safari in Reader mode. For the moment this seems the most convenient tool for me, even though it only runs on my Laptop and seems to have its own glitches. We will see where it goes.

3 thoughts on “Vienna RSS”

  1. I’m not overly enthusiastic about Newsblur, but still enough to pay the – modest – fee. But it’s true that I haven’t found, among the many services that I tried to replace Google Reader, the “wow, how could I have lived without that?” app I was hoping for.

    I remember having used Vienna in the past, but what I wanted was really an in-browser service.

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