reeder

Reeder, the new best RSS reader for Mac, is finally out of beta! It's only $9.99, on the Mac App Store.

I used NetNewsWire back in the early '00s, but it has become a complicated beast, and after learning about Reeder beta 1 a few months ago, I was an instant convert.

Reeder is great, because all I ever do is arrow-down through news stories, glance over ones I might be interested, press 'B' to open the really interesting articles in my browser, and then press 'A' then 'return' to mark all stories as read.

It's fast, simple, elegant, and hides a ton of extra complexity (in case you want to do more with it than I do). I love it even more on the iPad... it's simply the best solution for iPad or Mac. I don't bother reading news feeds on the iPhone much, though (I use both NetNewsWire and Reeder on that platform).

More on Reeder and RSS:

• Reeder for Mac - Usage Tips
• What do "Syndicate this Site" and "RSS" mean?
• News Feed 

After about a week's use of Reeder for Mac (currently at 'Draft 4' status), I can finally ditch NetNewsWire, and confidently state that I would pay maybe something like $20 for this new Mac application.

NetNewsWire has always been a little slow, a little clunky, but at least it was reliable.

Reeder brings a lot of the simplicity of the iOS Reeder apps (both of which I have - Reeder for iPad and Reeder for iPhone) to desktop Macs. There are some odd UI glitches that are simple annoyances, but don't get in the way of my personal use of the app.

However, every new draft release brings with it more goodies, more polish, and more awesomesauce.

Some of my favorite key commands:

• A, then Enter - Marks all stories as read, and clears them out of the Unread view.
• R - Refresh. Simple, and no command key needed!
• Up/Down or K/J - Previous/next item
• B - View in browser (can configure to pop-behind in preferences)

Read more about Reeder here, and download the beta here.