Posted February 6th, 2008, in: Technology

For a while now, I’ve been using Bloglines. It’s OK. But today I decided to dust off my old NewsGator account after hearing from BetaNews that NewsGator purchased the Macintosh feed reader NetNewsWire. I thought at the very least this would mean some decent drag-n-drop-ability, but that’s just the beginning.

So now, NewsGator offers a desktop client (they have one for Windows too) that syncs with the online version of the service. Of course it’s free.

The UI is very similar to Apple Mail, the advantage being, among other things, that something isn’t marked as read until you actually highlight it, revealing the content in a resizable reading area. And if you double-click on the Headline, the article maximizes to take up all the space, aside from the main sidebar on the left and a tinier sidebar on the right that allows you to toggle between the two views.

When you do read something, it doesn’t go away, it’s just ‘read,’ so it’s not bold and there’s no blue bullet next to it. Oh, and like Mail, you can reorder stuff by name or date (but not by flag or read/unread).

I noticed while using Bloglines, that my behavior started to change in a bad way. Since as soon as you see something in Bloglines, it goes away, I found myself not wanting to glance at my feeds until I knew I had pleanty of time to process all the articles. So this past week, for instance, my feeds were piling up and the more they piled up, the more afraid I became of getting started. Certainly this is not the way to go. And NewsGator solves all of this for me.

The best thing about NewsGator though is definitely the fact that when you manage (add, delete, move) your feeds locally, the online version gets updated and vice-versa. Sweet!

Unless this thing starts crashing all the time, I’m never looking back. Goodbye Bloglines. Sorry.