RSS Readers for Mac @ Radio Free Blogistan

April 25, 2004

Christopher L. Filkins

Brent Simmons at Ranchero is getting ready to make a major upgrade to NetNewsWire while Erik Barzeski will be soon launching his new news reader called PulpFiction.

It's very nice to see such a race to develop better tools for reading syndication files. Notice how these tools are now rendering web pages within the apps themselves. I suspect that this will begin showing up in more and more apps used to read syndication files. In many ways it seems rather obvious that the death of competition in the browser space (how many more years till Microsoft upgrades their browser again?) has pushed the pace of web page rendering and forced this functionality into more and more apps outside of classic browsers. Eventually rendering web pages will likely become a fungible function available in most modern apps.

Posted by filchyboy at April 25, 2004 12:06 PM

Comments

It's already happening. :)

Since WebKit on OS X provides a really dead-simple drop-in component for Cocoa apps, it's starting to pop up as a display component:

http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2004/02/12/colloquy_irc

Also, Adium (adiumx.com) is starting to do the same thing.

I know that IE is embeddable on Windows, as is Mozilla, but I haven't looked into how hard/easy those browsers are to play with. I do know that you can write a one-line browser in Cocoa though :)

Posted by: l.m.orchard at April 27, 2004 7:32 AM

Agreed that it's very interesting to see the race to develop better tools, on all platforms for that matter.

What can be problematic is sifting through the mass of stuff being developed to figure out which product is most suitable to your needs.

Posted by: Benoit at April 28, 2004 6:01 AM