A day before Newsgator made their RSS Suite totally FREE, Amit did a review of Newsgator’s FeedDemon (Windows RSS Feed Reader), which got me thinking about NetNewsWire. Let me give you a brief about my RSS Feed Reader usage before suggesting ‘How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire’.

I have been using RSS Feed Readers in a way or the other ever since the hay days of the blogging revolution in the early 2000s. While on Windows, I graduated to a full fledged RSS Reader with Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon ever since its very early days. Bradbury Software, Nick’s company that made FeedDemon was acquired by NewsGator Technologies in May 2005 (I think Nick works with Newsgator at present). My FeedDemon license was alive in all those acquisitions, upgrades and I was a happy user of FeedDemon all along.

The Apple Mac and NetNewsWire

During summer, 2006 I got converted and amongst all other important Mac softwares – RSS Feed Reader was also one of my primary App. I did an install-test study of many RSS Feed Readers before taking the final decision. NetNewsWire was my ultimate choice after testing it for almost 3 weeks. It was however not free then but was worth every penny. (Note: I installed and used most the RSS Readers for almost a month to study them.)

With the short story above, I’m pretty sure you must have a vague idea that I’m like one of you – a regular Internet guy – who reads lots of RSS Feeds every day. Thus, I’m pretty confident that I can tell you ‘How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire‘.

Tweak, Tweak, Tweak

Tweaking of apps to give you the best result, best output and best usage is a gradual process. Never stop tweaking, never stop experimenting with permutations and combinations of various options and preferences. Here, let me summarize various settings which have worked good for me so far. I urge you to try them, enhance them and change them to suit you best. So, let’s start tweaking – Open up the Preferences.

Internet is still best with small things

However fast your internet connection bandwidth may be, on the Internet it is alway a good idea to have things in their small version (if available) – smaller image size, smaller css files, smaller and quicker downloads. The same applies to anything that interact with the Internet constantly – NetNewsWire is not an exception. Change the Preferences in NetNewsWire to let it do things quicker, with lesser resource and to give you the quickest response possible.

Preferences > General > Reading

• You do not need to read changes to an article, unless you were following the topic and if you were following it then you would have flag it or clipped it. However, highlighting it is good just in case you have free time to laze around and happen to read old feeds again.
• Show only 10 Items per page for the fast view while in Combined View mode.
• You don’t really need to check for software updates. You’ll definitely come to know of updates if there is one sooner than later and you don’t need to be the first top users at all. Not just for NetNewsWire, I apply this rule to all Apps. See, squeeze out every ounce of delay from an App.

Preferences > General > Archiving

• Honestly, I never needed to archive feeds. What is Google for? Search there and if you don’t remember the keywords – it definitely is not that important. Nonetheless, you might just do a monthly HTML archive for keep-sake if you are really inclined to.
• 7 days is enough to keep feeds in NetNewsWire. I suggest changing this to about 30 days for those who are average to moderate users.

Preferences > Browsing >Behavior

• It is quicker to stay at a single location to do multiple actions. So, browsing inside NetNewsWire is a faster way (Open Links in > NetNewsWire) and of course, you can jump out if an article needs more attention or you’ll spend more time analyzing it.
• Oh! yes, do ‘Open Links in Background’ and avoid the wasteful time due to distraction from opened tabs.
• Finally, you’d want to return to the news item when the tab is closed.

The News Items and Web Pages are best left as it is, nothing much going on there.

You can skip the other 3 setting preferences too – Colors, Fonts, Posting. They’ve nothing to do with speed or optimization. However, you might like to see which font suits you best and which size is best for your layout (screen size ).

Preferences > Downloading > Feeds

Yes, the ‘minimum 30 minutes feed refresh’ limitation of NetNewsWire can be a disappointment for some people. However, with my experience I can guarantee that anything frequent than that will drastically reduce your work-productivity. A strong suggestion would be to increase the feed refresh time if you wish to get more work done and less distraction with an ‘info-overload’.

• An hourly refreshment of your subscription should do ‘more than enough justice’ to be on top of the news happening around your topic. Personally, I’ve increased it from my frenzy 30 minutes updates to a nominal ’2 hours’ update frequency.
• Reduce the concurrent downloads to just about ’5′. Of course, I’m on a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with just 2GB of RAM. Higher end Macs can increase that to about ’10′.

Well, you don’t really need to download enclosures. But again if you’re an avid podcast listener (I’m not one), you can let it automatically add podcasts to iTunes.

Preferences > Downloading > Feeds

• You DO NOT need to sync (most of the times) if you use a single computer or a laptop. If you want to sync between your office and home, think again – Do you really want to disturb your family life. Sync only if you really need to.

Tips & Tricks

I don’t really like “Sort by Last Update” more because I like things the way I set them. So, if “Sort by Last Update”, the way last feeds are on top, so be it and stick to it. In order to set few priority feeds (Sorted by Name), I setup folder names starting with Numbers (in my case)

1. Smart Folders
2. Hot Feeds
3. My Feeds
4. Statistics
5. Tags

etc.

This way, the feeds that I frequent most will always be on the top and I can read just that when I don’t want to scroll down. The Smart Lists allows me to look for my favorite keywords and other criteria-based results from my feeds even if I don’t really go and read all individual feeds. Clippings and Flags allow me to bookmark feeds which I can get back later.

The “Post to Del.icio.us” is another awesome tool to make the best of NetNewsWire. However, take not that if you post directly from the feeds, the feed url will be bookmarked (for instance the feedburner url). So, let the feed open up in a new tab and post it from the tab to bookmarked the actual Web URL.

Did I forgot to tell you to take advantage of the Wide-Screen Layout option if you are on a Wide-Screen computer. It has the best viewing experience.

Keyboard Shortcuts Download

I’ve done a printable Keyboard Shortcuts for NetNewsWire to help you further enhance your RSS Reading habits. Download, Print and Pin it up for about a week or so and you’ll get used to the keys.

• Printable PDF
• iWork’s Numbers
• MS Office Excel (this is the exported version from Numbers)

What about Google Reader users? Google Reader is awesome!

I did flirted with Google Reader and at its current version, I won’t hesitate to say that it is one hell of an awesome Web Application. I’ll be coming up with an article on my experience with Google Reader. I’ll also do a comparison matrix of NetNewsWire and Google Reader that will help you choose which one to use.

elsewhere

• TUAW did a comparison of NetNewsWire and Vienna
• Amit’s view on Why FeedDemon is Better Than Google Reader and Bloglines

Note: I had over 1,000+ feeds but was able to reduce it to 765 at the time of writing this article.

muCommander is a Freeware but you can donate if you feel good about it.

Here are some of its cool features;

• Virtual filesystem with local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP and Bonjour support.
• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files.
• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives.
• ZIP files can be modified on-the-fly, without having to recompress the whole archive.
• Universal bookmarks and credentials manager.
• Multiple windows support.
• Full keyboard access.
• Highly configurable.

muCommander is available in 18 languages – English (US & UK), French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch and Slovak.

Download muCommander (it even has a portable version).

So, liven up your Address book with Gravatars and Pavatars with a little help from Avatars.

The application is reported to be completely stable. IEs4OSX rely on X11, thus browser window looks like something straight out of a monochrome version of Windows 98. Nonetheless, pages render as they should – complete with IE 6 / 7 quirks included CSS rendering issues and window pop-ups. Ain’t that cool?

Here are the goodness of IEs4OSX:

• VMware and Parallels are great, but having to wait for an entire OS to boot sucks! Thankfully Internet Explorer 6 / 7 load in mere seconds on a MacBook Pro.
• Typing http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 from within ies4osx Internet Explorer windows will load your local development directory. No modifications of hosts files necessary.
• Crossover users will enjoy the eye pleasing anti-aliased font rendering offered by ies4osx installs.
• Thanks to the automatic installation of standard plugins like Flash, web pages load in their entirety.
• Saving web pages or files off the internet – by default – are stored in your Home directory.
• Less memory consumption. VMware Fusion with Internet Explorer running uses 87 MB. Standalone Internet Explorer via X11 24.84 MB.

Via: 5ThirtyOne’s article ies4osx, Internet Explorer, Intel Macs need only apply

Note: Remember that many keyboard shortcuts are different on the Windows from the Mac.

However, Flickr released the official Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X recently and this should be one good software to have if you use Flickr.

But after using FlickrExport, it will be difficult to move away from such an awesome software. Currently, Flickr Uploadr have no option to set Sets or Send to Groups and it do not show your tags.

1. QuickSilver
2. TextWrangler (You can try Smultron too but if you are serious, then the best would be a commercial text editor – TextMate)
3. SilverKeeper (A Backup Utility that is packaged along with Lacie Drives)
4. Adium (Instant Messenger)
5. HandBrake (DVD Ripper)
6. iSquint (video file to iPod converter)
7. VirtueDesks (Virtual Desktops Manager)
8. The Unarchiver
9. VLC MediaPlayer
10. iTerm

Today, let me try to compile a list of applications that you’ll need on the Mac after conversion from a Windows world. This should apply to anyone who is new to the Mac. Nonetheless, you may need few more additional applications depending on your profession. For instance, a Developer who do Design with (Photoshop, XHTML, CSS) will have a slightly different set of applications than a Rich Internet Application Developer (Flash, ActionScript, Flex, Ajax). Whereas, a user who does more of a Community Liaison will have a bit of more slightly different software sets. I may be slightly biased but my observation will be more tuned towards a power Internet User, Web Developer, Multimedia Developer and of course Bloggers.

Most applications listed below will have preference of Free and Open Source over their commercial counterparts. But this will not rule out the fact that some of commercial applications are better than their free, open source competitors. There are many articles written by renowned Mac Users, Mac Enthusiasts, Industry Experts and Gurus about Windows to Mac conversion – the applications to use, et al. This article would be best treated as compliments to such articles and the final decision be taken with your own experience. Most of the Mac applications mentioned here will be cross referenced to their Windows counterpart at the later section of the article, so it will help new converts more effectively. This article will be updated as and when need arises.

Special Thanks to the following Mac Enthusiast who shared their experience with many of the softwares listed below. The list would have been far from complete without them.

• Glenn Wolsey
• Paul Stamatiou
• Derek Punsalan

COST of the Mac Applications listed here sums up to a little over $2,000. The good news is that, an economical/optimal listing can be managed within $200 and a Professional/Advanced listing can be done in about $1,300.

Download the Excel Sheet which I was working on that list the Applications along with their price.

Disclaimer : I’ve neither affiliation nor endorsement for any of the Softwares mentioned in this article.

APPLE MAC APPLICATIONS

EMAIL
Thunderbird is a good option but why look anywhere else when Mac OS X comes with a kick ass Mail Management software – Mail. It has never been this great with emails before. If you are regular with NewsGroups, then Mail won’t be able to do on its own. Thunderbird’s latest Alpha release is a good News Reader.

BROWSER
Safari is good but with Firefox’s add-ons, Firefox comes out as the clear winner. There are Mac enhanced version of Firefox for PPC and the Intel Mac, but I finds the new Firefox 2.0 good and fast enough.

RSS FEED READER
There are many good and free RSS Feed Reader for the mac. After trying out many of them, I settled for NetNewsWire.

PASSWORD MANAGER
KeepassX is an open source Mac counterpart of KeePass (windows) and I never needed to try another Password Management Software. I’m extremely satisfied and happy with KeepassX. 1Passwd and Wallet are commercial alternatives and I’ve heard many good reviews about the same.

INSTANT MESSENGER
Look no further; Adium is open source and the best All-in-One Instant Messenger.

OFFICE SUITE
Here again, I’ve not found any good free or open source Office Suite though NeoOffice came very close. It is sluggish but you can live with it if you don’t use it regularly. NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice for the Mac. If you are a regular user of Powerpoint Presentations, Documents etc, then you have to stick to Microsoft Office for Mac. I have trying my hand on Keynote which is a part of the iWork Bundle.

STICKIES, NOTES
I use the stickies that comes with OSX but yet to get used to it. I would rather love to use xPad – a notepad, sticky combination. I bought xPad few months back, but you’re lucky, as it now a freeware. Glenn Wolsey says that he is looking forward to Apple Mail 3 for the sticky, notes feature.

TEXT EDITOR
A Text Editor is like your Shoe. I’ve not really found a Text Editor of my ultimate choice though Smultron, which is a freeware, comes very close. May be that I’ve not found my love, I just stick to Eclipse to even write/edit blog articles offline. WriteRoom is a good one if you plan to do some serious writing concentrating totally on your writing. WriteRoom is no longer freeware and is a shareware by now. Apple Pages which is bundled with iWorks is another alternative from Apple.

Well, I switched to TextMate recently, and it makes me feel right at home with many similar features that I enjoyed with TextPad. My final decision is thus with TextMate as the ultimate Text Editor. In fact, I’ve an additional license right now (from the MacHeist Bundle) and am thinking of gifting it away.

IMAGE EDITOR
Photoshop for the real graphic work. For all the other quick and fast image manipulation – cropping, resizing (which you do for dropping on to your blog articles), I would high recommend ImageWell.

FTP
There are many free and open source FTP Program for the Mac but I’ve not found one that comes close to FileZilla or WS_FTP on Windows. After testing many FTP applications for the mac including but not limited to CyberDuck, Fetch, etc. I settled for the commercial software, Transmit. It is perhaps the best FTP Program for the Mac. Transmit is worth every penny of it. I like it so much, I gifted another copy to a good friend of mine.

ADD/REMOVE or UNINSTALLER
On a Mac, it is said that you can simply Trash an APP and that’s it. However, when you delete an APP, many of its dependent, related libraries are left over on your Mac. AppDelete which is free is an amazing software to uninstall/remove your installed applications. It may be noted that AppDelete cannot delete dependent files separately and is very basic. If you are looking for a serious Uninstaller/Remover then AppZapper is the one. AppZapper does an amazing job at just $12.95 (this is a one time purchase with lifetime upgrades). AppZapper can list out all the applications on your mac, remove preference panes files, widgets, plugins, screen savers. It even allows you to delete just the Support Folder, .plists etc.

TORRENT
I tried Azureus, BitRocket, Transmission but I find Xtorrent to be the best torrent software for the Mac so far. However, you may just stay with Transmission which is an open source and light application instead of XTorrent which is not going to be free afterall.

LOCAL WEB SERVER
MAMP is an Out-of-the-Box solution for your local webserver needs. It comes inbuilt with an Apache server running PHP, MySQL and SQLite complete with eAccelerator, phpMyAdmin, SQLiteManager and is extremely easy to setup. While the free version is good enough, there is a Pro version of MAMP that will set you back by $49.00.

MUSIC PLAYER, MANAGER
iTunes from Apple.

VIDEO PLAYER
Quicktime from Apple, the open source Media Player VLC is a good alternative.

PHOTO MANAGEMENT
iPhoto from Apple. More advanced professional photographers seem to prefer Aperture. However, iPhoto is far and enough for all your photos. Get FlickrExport if you want to upload photos to Flickr from iPhoto directly, efficiently and easily. I beta tested Adobe Photoshop LightRoom but it was too heavy for common users, let’s leave that for professional photographers.

DEVELOPMENT IDE
Eclipse and/or the various Distros including Flex Builder, CFEclipse, MyEclipse, WPT is the supreme Development IDE.

GAMES (casual break play)
I stopped playing games long back. For light play, I like Minesweeper alternative for the Mac, Chess and of course the Titris clone – Quine.

UTILITIES / BACKUPS / BURNERS / MISC
Toast Titanium is the ultimate Disc Burning Application. However, Burn is good open source alternative with a less features for the less demanding users. While we wait for the Time Machine in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard, SuperDuper would do a good job to Backup and Clone your data. SVN is good for Version Control of your Projects, codes. You can integrate SVN with Finder. QuickSilver is an awesome tool to help you work easily with applications, contacts, music, and other data.

MICROSOFT WINDOWS SOFTWARES

This article’s target is mostly those new Windows-to-Mac converts, so it would be fare if I complete the article with the Windows Software counterparts to the Must-Have Software list. However, I’ve not used Windows in the past 8-10 months and the list here are from what I used earlier.

EMAIL / RSS FEED READER / NEWS READER
Thunderbird is an extremely good email program. With its 2.0 alpha release, it even has NewsReader support besides email and RSS feed management. However, for the business professionals Microsoft Outlook fare better with its easy integration with many other softwares, sync data, take notes. I was a heavy Outlook user with the Newsgator Inbox plugin to read and manage RSS Feeds. FeedDemon is the ultimate Standalone RSS Feed Reader. My reason for using Newsgator Inbox Plugin was that it was able to double up as a NewsReader too.

BROWSER
Of course, Firefox. Internet Explorer, Opera etc can be used for testing.

FTP
I started off using WS_FTP which is a commercial software but moved to FileZilla, an open source FTP Program which is an amazing software. Unless one is a sys-admin or do heavy FTP stuffs, FileZilla will fit the requirements. I find WS_FTP to be a real heavyweight.

ADD/REMOVE or UNINSTALLER
Windows comes with its own Add/Remove Software inbuilt though there are other commercial softwares that does much more enhanced functions. However, the one that comes with Windows is enough in most cases.

PASSWORD MANAGER
Keepass is a free and extremely cool Password Management Software.

INSTANT MESSENGER
The standard version is free but the one time license Pro version of Trillian is my ultimate choice for the All-in-One Instant Messenger. There are many other good competitors but I never tried any of them and was happy with Trillian.

OFFICE SUITE
Microsoft Office Suite is not cheap at all at. If you are fine with a little sluggish replacement then of course OpenOffice is the ultimate Microsoft Office replacement.

STICKIES, NOTES
The Notes of Microsoft Outlook never worked for me and thus I turned to Stickies. It is free and an extremely efficient sticky for Windows.

TEXT EDITOR
If you are not comfortable with it, you will never be productive. The Windows Notepad is never enough for anybody and everybody have some sorta Text Editor of their choice. I would not really say which is the best as many of them are equally good, it was just a matter of habit and discipline one develops with a particular Text Editor. There are a plethora of Text Editor ranging from commercial Paidware to Freeware and open source ones. My ultimate choice was Textpad which is a paidware. If you are looking for a free one, then Notepad++ is the ultimate choice.

IMAGE EDITOR
Of course for the real, actual graphic work, it is Photoshop. Paint.Net is a free and a nifty tool for quick and fast image manipulation.

TORRENT
I never really use torrents so, it would not be that accurate but Azureus was a good enough tool for me.

LOCAL WEBSERVER
There are lots for windows, my favorite was WAMP.

MUSIC PLAYER, MANAGER
WinAmp is not bad but iTunes is the de facto Music Player, Manager.

VIDEO PLAYER
Windows Media Player, QuickTime, VLC.

PHOTO MANAGEMENT
ACDSee. People find irfanView to be a good and free alternative but I was never happy with it.

GAMES
Games have their own realm and I am not a gamer at all. Thus, I am not good with this section. My usual first task after a successful windows installation was to remove all the Games. However, on a lighter vein, if I have to play something, then it was either Solitaire or Minesweeper.

DEVELOPMENT IDE
Eclipse and its variants including, Flex Builder, CFEclipse, MyEclipse, WPT. TopStyle Pro is my favorite CSS Editor and I would even recommend it highly for beginners. It has a good context sensitive help, CSS sweeping (cleaning) capability. However, Eclipse even can be a wonderful CSS Editor if plugged in with a CSS Editor Plugin. Aptana standalone or the plugin is a good Web Development IDE for Eclipse. Color Schemer is a good tool if you are involved with designs.

UTILITIES / BACKUPS / BURNERS / MISC
Nero is one of the professional Media Burner. However, a free burning software which does most of the common task is CDBurnerXP Pro. TortoiseSVN is a must-have SVN tool.

Each to do item can be linked with a file on your computer, a URL, such as the address of a website, or a contact from your address book. The linked item can be opened directly from the ToDo window. ToDo items can also include notes, priorities and deadlines, which can be set as reminders in iCal.

ToDo is applescriptable, includes plugins for Address book to quickly set contact reminders and a plugin for Quicksilver to allow rapid creation of ToDo items from the Quicksilver interface. ToDo can import iCal to do lists, and export lists from to do to import into iCal. You can set your ToDo deadlines as events in iCal with a single click. You can sync your ToDo lists on multiple computers using .Mac.

Name: xPad User
Email: support@getxpad.com
Code: X6893-2055-5686-9378

xPad, written in Cocoa, is the ultimate notepad, TextEdit and Stickies replacement for Apple’s OS X. With a simple, easy-to-use interface and powerful multi-document features, xPad will quickly become your daily text editor of choice.

With xPad you can create as many documents as you like, all of which are managed in one window. Attached to that window is a drawer containing a list of all the documents you’ve created. Any document can be selected and loaded instantly—at any time—allowing you to easily create and manage hundreds of documents without cluttering your desktop.

Staying organized with xPad is easy. With the category editor you can create and color-code categories, then quickly assign documents in the drawer. Documents can be sorted by name, date or category. Now you can efficiently manage limitless documents with color coding that provides a constant reminder of your organizational scheme.

You can quickly rename documents, delete one or many, and export a single, multiple, or all your documents in both Rich and Plain Text formats using both drag and drop or conventional panels. You can also instantly export to your iPod, allowing you to read your documents when you are away from your computer.

xPad automatically saves your work, so you never have to worry about manually saving what you’re working on or accidentally closing something without saving—and losing all your information.