Switched to NetNewsWire

After a couple of years of looking at all my feeds online, I have finally made the switch to NNW. The bloglines integration from v2 made it really simple for me to bring all of my feeds over, but it still took some effort to convince me.

I grabbed the demo version about a month ago and got it working, but I kept looking at everything on bloglines without really thinking about it. I decided that I would do everything in NNW for a week, to give it a fair try - and I haven't viewed anything on bloglines since :)

The Good

• Bloglines would get really slow sometimes, and at times it made me remember "oh, I'm looking at all of this on a web page". NNW gets rid of that feeling for the most part
• It's nice to have access to articles when I'm not online (it was very nice on CalTrain during WWDC), and to search previous entries without having to do extra work
• being able to share my subscriptions with bloglines and/or between machines is great
• the diff'ing feature is so much fun! It's interesting to see how some of the more "out there" statements get brought back in line over time :) It also stops me from wondering why I'm seeing an old headline again

The Not-Quite-As-Good

• Doing things with tabs takes FOREVER after the app has been running a while (clicking, closing, switching; it will sometimes take 10 seconds for the app to respond - I've accidently closed lots of tabs this way) - looking at the bug DB, other people have reported this as 1855 and 1857, so I'm not alone. It just means I have to quit and relaunch the app every day or two, so it's not the end of the world. Much better than crashing, which is what tends to happen to browsers after a while :)
• Browser scripts - I have a number of scripts for things I do in the browser - 'add to bloglines' and 'add to del.icio.us', etc; that I don't have access to in NNW. There's probably a way that I haven't found yet, but for now I just have to open the page in Safari to use them...
• Other browser things that don't always work - sometimes javascript popups or other plugins within a web page have trouble within NNW. Again, I just open the page in Safari and it's fine.
• Although NNW does a really good job with it's outline view, I just don't like how that type of view works in general. There's probably a bigger design post about this to come...
• As they mention in the help documentation, the bloglines support is pretty simple right now - there's no automatic way to add a NNW subscription back into bloglines, for example. I need to send them some notes on this...

I really don't have a list of "The Bad", which just shows off the quality of NNW. I'm really happy that I made the switch, and now I can go be the annoying guy asking them for new features :)