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Google Reader

Thursday, 6 August 2009 2:48pm

I've used a number of RSS readers over the years, and even wrote a few of my own (Newsfox, Fizzle, Beatnik). However, when I bought my MacBook Pro a few years ago, I settled on NetNewsWire as my app of choice. After getting my iPhone, the NNW app was one of the first I downloaded. I signed up for NewsGator to sync my feeds and read/unread between my phone and laptop. I might have too many feeds for the iPhone app to work well, but it did its job, and I was pretty happy with the setup.

Not long after that, I realized I could access all my synced feeds in NewsGator from the browser. So now I could read my synced feeds on my daytime Windows dev box. The online NewsGator app is pretty much abysmal, but it works, and syncs, and since I couldn't do any of that before, I was happy enough.

So when I got wind that the next release of NNW was dropping NewsGator syncing in favor of Google Reader, my ears perked up a bit. On one hand thats interesting since NewsGator bought NNW, but I was more interested in the browser experience. It had been several years since I'd tried out Google Reader, and while I thought it was ok, I don't remember being overly impressed.

But I decided to give it another go. I exported all my feeds from NNW and imported them effortlessly into Google Reader. The UI seems to be the same as before. But this time it "felt" alot better, not sure why (is it the enormous performance gains we've seen in the last year or two that makes it feel zippy now?). I found it easy to scan and read all my feeds. In fact, I like it so much I might just drop NNW altogether and use Google Reader exclusively.