An important part of my day is going through the 220 or so blogs that I actively read. Obviously, not all of them are daily posters but still it’s something that means that there is activity to go through many times each day (except this particular week as many bloggers and podcasters seem to take time off – rightly so). My feed reader of choice is NetNewswire. It’s a very good reader for OS X. The developer is even working on an update that sounds like it has some interesting features.
Anyway, I’ve been on Leopard (OS X 10.5) for a while now and the version of Mail that comes with it came with a new feature and that was the ability to read RSS feeds – to be a feed reader. I was intrigued.
The first hurdle kept me from trying it till yesterday though and that was a big one. Leopard’s Mail (or Safari) does not import OPML files which is the industry standard for RSS feed import and export. As good as Apple software is, this is just a brain dead oversight and I cannot believe what went in this decision. Let’s make things hard for our users – that just doesn’t sound like Apple but in this case it is.
After I got through the work around (wow, it was a huge pain in the …) I discovered 1 major issue and 1 less major issue.
The less major issue is that Leopard Mail will not let me sort my feeds in the manor I want. It will let me put them in groups (mailboxes) but it will not let me sort the groups and instead forces alphebetical order. That is just not flexible.
The major issue is that with my 220 or so feeds that Leopard Mail becomes nearly unusable. It seems to lose track of mail and the feeds don’t get updated correctly or let me delete posts and other management tasks. If I delete down to one or two feeds all is ok but that is not a very useful feed reader.
Back to NetNewswire – which is great because it is a great app but it was disappointing to find Leopard Mail so lacking.